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A review by burdasnest
The Fever: Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years by Sonia Shah
informative
slow-paced
3.5
It's perhaps a little unfair to only rate this 3/5, but I'm knocking off points because there's been a lot of development between its publication in 2010 and now. But the parts that are the most valuable are the same as those still relevant from Infections and Inequalities by Paul Farmer (1999): interventions that fail to take cultural context into account and make use of medical anthropology are ill-fated.
Personally, if you have any background on malaria, it's the middle third of this book that you'll want to read and you can skip the rest. The Mosquito by Timothy Winegard and The American Plague by Molly Caldwell Crosby do a better job of filling in how mosquito-borne diseases have shaped human history, but the deep dive into the more recent cultural context of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia found here is unique and a useful scolding of paternalistic public health and NGOs, myself included.
One question Shah asks that remains to be answered today: how do we humans learn to coexist with malaria while protecting ourselves as we continue to adapt to to a changing and heated world?
Personally, if you have any background on malaria, it's the middle third of this book that you'll want to read and you can skip the rest. The Mosquito by Timothy Winegard and The American Plague by Molly Caldwell Crosby do a better job of filling in how mosquito-borne diseases have shaped human history, but the deep dive into the more recent cultural context of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia found here is unique and a useful scolding of paternalistic public health and NGOs, myself included.
One question Shah asks that remains to be answered today: how do we humans learn to coexist with malaria while protecting ourselves as we continue to adapt to to a changing and heated world?