Does malaria date back to the American Revolution?
During the Civil War, living and serving in the Washington, D.C. area I think was considered hardship duty, because of the hot, humid conditions that favored malaria transmission, and in fact a lot of the people living in the area came down with malaria. At the time of the American Revolution, we really didn’t understand what malaria was. I mean the parasite hadn’t yet been identified, we didn’t know much of anything about it. When did malaria shift into developed countries, in modern terms? Whenever business travelers and travelers from the developed world traveled into developing nations, they put themselves at risk for getting infectious diseases, and I think probably because of the increase in the amount of travel that occurred in the 1970’s and 1980s’ that we did see an increase in the number of travelers that came down with malaria, and they went to these areas of the world where malaria was endemic, they were bitten by mosquitoes, and sometimes they came home infected with malar
