The history of malaria control in Africa: lessons learned and future perspectives

Malaria has been in Africa for thousands and perhaps millions of years . There are few early records of h ow the disease was managed by African medicine men . Part of the reason is that African medical knowledge was passed on orally; in later years it was repressed by the entry of Christianity, which considered folk medicine to be largely witchcraft . Antigens attributable to this parasite demonstrated in cranial scrap­ ings taken from Egyptian mummies from the Middle Kingdom period [ 1 ] . Clearly, the disease has affected the health and life of African peoples for millennia.