The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria

by Mark Honigsbaum

Book Overview

Part science, part riveting historical adventure about one of the great scourges to afflict mankind Every year malaria kills 1.5 to 2.7 million people -- more than half of those deaths are children -- and 300 to 500 million people fall ill with the disease. As of yet, there is no cure. Malaria is a deadly virus with a vicious ability to mutate; it has, over the centuries, changed the course of history as epidemics swept through countries and devastated...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374154694
• ISBN13: 9780374154691
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 2.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

History of Malaria

The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria. Malaria is a huge worldwide problem. And it's getting worse. More countries are reporting cases of Malaria. Resistance to the standard drugs is growing. This book gives a good overview of the history of Malaria and provides a complete discussion of the discovery and search for Quinine. For me, the most interesting part of the book are the last chapters which cover the new drugs for Malaria and the direction of research on vaccines against Malaria. Since I am involved in Malaria vaccine research, I was most interested in that aspect and this book does not have as much detail about vaccines as I would like. If you are looking to learn more about the history of Malaria this is a great book.

The True Cost of Things We Take for Granted

"The Fever Trail" is a remarkable tale of the quest for a cure for malaria. Unfortunately the early and hard won triumphs of quinine have been somewhat short lived. Now malaria threatens us again throughout the warmer parts of the planet, but the quinine story is none the less riveting for that. Quinine is no longer the preferred treatment for the disease, but it made exploration of the tropics by Europeans possible, as well as making parts of Europe and North America more habitable. The difficulties and missteps involved in the development of quinine are echoed in just about every drug, food or other product that we now take for granted. Such items as honey, sugar, antibiotics, nuclear power, crop varieties, domestic animals, plastics, computers, etc., each have their own stories and at least some of these need to be more emphasized to make us all less complacent. The message is that knowledge is often hard won and needs to be respected. It can also (as in nuclear power) be a double-edged sword.While the author often rambles, I did not find this too much of a distraction. Instead I was (as I say above) impressed by how human perseverance and even deviousness had managed to overcome huge obstacles to deliver the miracle drug quinine to the outside world. This part of the malaria story has been seldom told in a popular book until now and "The Fever Trail" is very noteworthy for this reason. The later chapters cover discovery of the malarial parasite, the modern era of anti-malarial drugs, and the attempts to develop a vaccine, parts of the malaria story that several other authors have dealt with as well. The complexities of developing a vaccine are now more appreciated than they were when various researchers started working on the problem and made unsubstantiated and very rosy predictions which proved overblown. Malaria still threatens us and the long battle with this "tropical" disease is far from over. If nothing else, Mark Honigsbaum has reminded of this.

The Quest for Quinine

Malaria is still with us and getting worse. The story of the complicated, centuries-long battle against the disease that kills about a million people a year in Africa alone is well told in _The Fever Trail: In Search of the Cure for Malaria_ by Mark Honigsbaum. It is a story of astonishing human hardship in the effort (not always inspired by riches) to get understanding and control of the disease, but it is sadly clear by the end of the tale that despite the optimism of individual researchers, the tiny parasites borne by mosquitoes all over the world are simply too complicated for us to control any time soon.Much of the effort to cure malaria was sparked as Europeans spread over the world and found their lives in jeopardy from it. The Jesuits learned (perhaps from the Indians) about the bark from the cinchona tree, and the church recommended its use. Physicians in northern Europe, however, were deeply suspicious of such a papist and Jesuitical drug; Cromwell, according to legend, refused the "Popish remedy," and died. Even-tually the efficacy of the drug triumphed over religious bigotry. Much of The Fever Trail has to do with the nineteenth century race to steal specimens and get them to plantations owned by Europeans. In particu-lar, the efforts of three Englishmen, who in independent efforts, suffered unbelievable deprivations on the trail which are well described here. Strangely, the British efforts amounted to little. The Dutch bought seeds for £20 from one of the explorers, and they happened to be the very best specimens. They went to Java, grown in scientifically designed plantations, and the Dutch cornered the market on quinine.If quinine were a real cure, malaria might now be as dead as smallpox. However, the parasite that causes the disease has a complicated life cycle within mosquitoes and humans, and is not so easily banished. It has become resistant to quinine and the other antimalarial drugs derived from quinine. The attempt by the World Health Organization to use DDT to blitz the mosquito forever from the Earth was a failure that showed just how resourceful evolution could be in making mosquitoes resistant as well. What is needed is a foolproof vaccine, but although we have vaccines against various viral illnesses, no one has been able to invent one that works against a parasite. The attempts to develop a vaccine, the complicated finances of making drugs that can be used in impoverished countries, and the advantages of the mosquito net (whose inventor, David Livingstone said, deserved a statue in Westminster Abbey) are all covered in a fascinating book that reads like dispatches from a long, losing war. With the prospect of global warming extending the reach of the mosquitoes, it may be that the worst of the war is yet to come.