The History of Malaria

Malaria is, like COVID, a largely preventable death: so long as the patient gets the right treatment at the right time. Many still do not have access to good medical care. For instance, in 2019, 409,000 people in Africa — mostly babies and toddlers — died of this disease.

But malaria is not a new malady — genetic sequencing has traced it back to well before 6,000 years ago, but around that time the Plasmodium falciparum that causes the disease greatly expanded. The image here of a bug (obviously not the Plasmodium, which ancient people had no knowledge of) calls to mind all the tiny organisms that Ancient Romans interacted with, that shaped people’s lives in profound and heartbreaking ways.

For instance, a 2016 study of teeth from Roman graves confirmed what historians had long suspected, which is that malaria was a scourge and killer back in the Roman Empire. Ancient Roman writers such as Celsus had warned about bad waters and seasonal fevers that all point to malaria as a force.

However, in general malaria was not the potent killer in Europe that it was in warmer climes to the south. Here again, genetic sequencing suggests that the disease shaped our collective DNA: there are at least twelve genes that provide resistance to malaria, and these do not surface much in Ancient European populations. (Sickle-cell disease and thalassemia are two disorders that pop up in populations with these malaria-resisting genes).

Many scholars have argued that human interaction with the environment has been a critical factor in causing malaria cases to rise. 6,000 years ago the world’s population jumped as urbanization (and the heavy concentrations of people that came along with it) really got going. And that’s when Plasmodium falciparum first increased.