ABSTRACT
The great aridity of much of the Middle East makes it an unsuitable environment for endemic malaria, but in the more well-watered oases and river valleys with a suitable mosquito vector of malaria, there is severe endemic malaria. The frequencies of the glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency in the Kurdish Jews, in some oasis populations in Saudi Arabia, and, apparently, in some populations of the Nile Delta are the highest in the world. The close correlation of the G6PD deficiency and malaria in the Mediterranean area contrasts with the findings from New Guinea and the Pacific. For the Pacific populations with the G6PD deficiency, it was shown that a small amount of gene flow from a population with a high G6PD-deficiency frequency would counterbalance the effects of selection against this deficiency. Although northern Europe had endemic malaria up to the nineteenth century, abnormal hemoglobins and the G6PD deficiency are apparently quite rare in all populations.
