New Weapons

The value of quinine in preventing and treating malaria was slow to be appreciated, but once it was, it became the drug of choice for a hundred years. Then, early in the second world war, Japanese troops captured important cinchona plantations in the Far East. The resulting severe shortage of quinine in the United States prompted intensive research to develop a synthetic antimalarial drug. The result was chloroquine, a drug that was safe, highly effective, and inexpensive to produce.

Chloroquine quickly became a major weapon against malaria. Also introduced in the 1940’s was the insecticide DDT, a powerful killer of mosquitoes. Although DDT stands for the intimidating chemical term dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, many English speakers remember the letters by the words “drop dead twice,” an appropriate memory aid, since not only does DDT kill mosquitoes at the time of spraying but later its residual presence on walls that have been sprayed kills insects.b

Optimistic Counterattack

Following the second world war, scientists armed with DDT and chloroquine organized a global counterattack against malaria and mosquitoes. The battle was to be fought on two fronts​—drugs would be used to kill the parasites in the human body, while massive spraying with insecticides would obliterate the mosquitoes.

The goal was total victory. Malaria was to be wiped out of existence. Leading the assault was the newly formed World Health Organization (WHO), which made the eradication program its top priority. Determination was backed by money. Between 1957 and 1967, the nations spent 1.4 billion dollars in the global campaign. Early results were spectacular. The disease was vanquished in Europe, North America, the Soviet Union, Australia, and some countries of South America. Professor L. J. Bruce-Chwatt, a veteran malaria fighter, reflected: “It would be difficult to describe today the tremendous enthusiasm that the concept of eradication evoked throughout the world during those halcyon days.” Malaria was reeling! WHO boasted: “Eradication of malaria has become a reality within our reach.”

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“There Is No ‘Magic Bullet’”

While the prospect of total victory seems remote, the battle against malaria continues. At an international conference on malaria in Brazzaville, Congo, in October 1991, WHO representatives called for a departure from the “ambient fatalism” and recommended a new global mobilization to control malaria. How successful will such efforts be?

“There is no ‘magic bullet’ for malaria,” stated WHO’s director-general Hiroshi Nakajima recently. “We must therefore fight it on many fronts.” Here are three battlefronts that have recently received much publicity:

Vaccines. Scientists have been working for years in search of a vaccine against malaria, and the media occasionally report “breakthroughs” in research. Squelching undue optimism, WHO cautions against the “delusion of the availability of an anti-malaria vaccine in the near future.”

One of the problems in developing a vaccine is that the malaria parasite in man has been remarkably successful in eluding the efforts of the human immune system to destroy it. Even after many years of repeated attacks, people develop only a limited immunity to the disease. Observes Dr. Hans Lobel, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta: “You don’t develop immunity after just a few attacks. So [in trying to develop a vaccine] you’re trying to improve on nature.”

Drugs. With the growing resistance of the malaria parasite to existing drugs, WHO is promoting a new medicine called arteether, derived from the Chinese herb extract qinghaosu.c WHO hopes that qinghaosu may be the source of an entirely new class of natural drugs, which may be available to the world community within ten years.

Bed nets. Still effective is this two-thousand-year-old protection against mosquitoes. Malaria mosquitoes usually attack at night, and a net keeps them away. Most effective are nets that have been dipped in an insecticide, such as permethrin. Studies in Africa show that in villages where dipped bed nets were introduced, malaria fatalities dropped by 60 percent.

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