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Mystery Rays from Outer Space
A couple of days ago I posted this map of malaria in the USA. It got picked up by Grant Jacobs, who made some interesting and useful comments, and that in turn got picked up by someone who posted it to boingboing.net. Unfortunately, whoever wrote it up for boingboing tried to add some value by offering a couple of points on the history of malaria, both of which were wrong. 1 In particular, he claimed that “It wasn’t until 1908 that a Cuban doctor made the connection with mosquitoes”. To set the record straight:
RECENT researches by Surgeon Major Ronald Ross have shown that the mosquito may be the host of parasites of the type of that which causes human malaria. Ross has distinctly proved that malaria can be acquired by the bite of a mosquito, and the results of his observations have a direct bearing on the propagation of the disease in man. Dr P. Manson describes the investigations in a paper in the British Medical Journal, and sums them up as follows: –The observation tend to the conclusion that the malaria parasite is for the most part a parasite of insects; that it is only an accidental and occasional …