ABSTRACT
No other disease in the course of human history has had as profound an effect on human development and well-being as malaria. Africans in Neolithic times, ancient Chinese and Greeks, Roman emperors, and hundreds of millions of other people—rich and poor—have died from this disease. For centuries, Africa was known as the White Man’s Grave because so many Europeans who went there lost their lives to malaria. During the early stages of World War II, General Douglas MacArthur lost more soldiers in the Pacific arena to malaria-carrying mosquitoes than to the Japanese. Today, up to 7,000 people, primarily children in sub-Saharan Africa, die from this disease every day. “There is no doubt that malaria has caused the greatest harm to the greatest number,” notes Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, a Nobel Prize–winning immunologist. 1
