Tournament of Pandemics - Plague vs Malaria - Part Two
This is the fourth pairing in the Tournament of Pandemics.
Malaria
Malaria is a nasty infection, and there is certainly plenty of it. 500 million people get sick with malaria every year, and a million of those people die of it. 40% of the world lives in malaria zones. It's evolving rapidly, and is now resistant to anti-malarial drugs. It's been around just as long as plague has - or maybe longer. The earliest reference to malaria was in China in 2700 BC.
Malaria is a lousy candidate for global pandemic, though, because it can't spread on its own. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. And not just any mosquitoes. Female anopheles mosquitoes. In an infectious period. I'm sorry, no matter how bad you are for economic development, or what kind of fancy-sounding protozoan parasite you may be, you don't get to kill half the planet if you need a single genus and gender of insect to do your dirty work.
For one thing, if it looked like malaria was going to go all influenza on us, we'd tell birds of prey they were on their own, and break out the DDT. Which is deadly for the environment, but that includes the mosquito part of the environment.
The Winner:
Plague. This is another lopsided match. Malaria's dangerous and unpleasant, a drag on the global economy and capable of terrible local damage. Terrible for pregnant women. Right now, it kills more people every year than plague does.
But plague is exactly the kind of disease that turns into a global pandemic. It's got several forms and several ways to infect. It's been a pandemic before, and we have no real way to keep that from happening again.
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