These was confusion about malaria. Up to recent
times people thought that malaria was caused by the unhealthy mists (called
“miasma”) that rise from marshy ground at night. The very name “malaria” shows
this; for it means “bad air”. But it has been proved that the culprit is not
marsh fog, but an insect, the mosquito. it is the bite of mosquitoes, or rather
or one kind of mosquito, the Anopheles, that gives people malaria.
Like most other diseases, malaria is due to a tiny
germ. This germ multiplying in a person’s blood gives him malaria, now when a
mosquito bites a person that has malaria, and sucks his blood; it takes in some
malaria germs. When it bites other persons after that, it injects into their
blood some of these malaria germs, which give those thus bitten malaria in
their turn. So mosquitoes are carriers of malaria from one person to another. The
only real cure for malaria is quinine. When you take quinine, it gets into your
blood, and kills the malaria germs there. People who live in malicious
districts take quinine as preventative: so that, if they get bitten by
mosquitoes, the malaria germs may be killed as soon as they get into the blood
before they can breed and multiply. They also take care to sleep under
mosquitoes-nets. These protect them from getting bitten by mosquitoes, which are
always most active at night.
But the only way to stamp out malaria is to get rid
of the mosquitoes. How can this be done? Well, the mosquitos begin its life as
a tiny grub in water. These grubs are hatched from eggs which the female
mosquito lays on the surface of stagnant water. The only way of stamping out
mosquitoes is to do away wit: he mosquitoes’ breeding places. So, standing pools
must be drayed dry, ditches of stagnant water cleaned out, and wells and
rain-water tanks kept covered. When a pool cannot be drained, its surface should
be covered with kerosene oil. This prevents mosquitos from laying their eggs
there, and it kills the mosquito grubs in water by preventing them coming up to
the surface to breathe.
If such measures were carried out systematically in
any malicious district, mosquitoes would in time be stamped out, as they have
in Pakistan; malaria, which is such a scourge in Pakistan, would trouble the
people no more.