Each of us is required to be taking malaria pills while in India. While reading The Hole In Our Gospel, I came across this description of malaria. Thank God it has been largely eradicated in the developed world! This is one messed up disease...

From The Hole In Our Gospel--

According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 500 million clinical cases of malaria each year, resulting in 1.5 to 2.7 million deaths. A 2007 cover article in National Geographic featured the extent to which malaria has plagued the human race over the centuries:

"Few civilizations, in all of history have escaped the disease. Some Egyptian mummies have signs of malaria. Hippocrates documented the distinct stages of the illness; Alexander the Great likely died of it, leading to the unraveling of the Greek Empire. Malaria may have stopped the armies of both Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.

"At least four popes died of it. It may have killed Dante, the Italian poet. George Washington sufferd from malaria, as did Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. In the late 1800s, malaria was so bad in Washington, D.C., that one prominent physician lobbied--unsuccessfully--to erect a gigantic wire screen around the city. A million Union Army casualties in the U.S. Civil War are attributed to malaria, and in the Pacific theater of World War II casualties from the disease exceeded those from combat. Some scientists believe that one out of every two people who have ever lived have died of malaria."

Despite the scope of malaria's impact on the world today and on human history, most of us know nothing about it. The one-celled parasites that transmit the disease, known as plasmodia, are carried by mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles. Just one drop of water the size of the period at the end of this sentence can contain as many as 50,000 plasmodia--yet it takes just one to kill a person...

...Thankfully, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has reignited efforts not just to control malaria but to eradicate it. They are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into research on both treatments and the development of a vaccine. In October 2007, Melinda Gates addressed a large gathering in Seattle on the issue of malaria and made this bold statement:

"The first reason to work to eradicate malaria is an ethical reason--the simple human cost. Every life has equal worth. Sickness and death in Africa are just as awful as sickness and death in America. In Africa and other areas of the developing world, malaria keeps adults from going to work, students from going to school, and children from growing up. Any goal short of eradicating malaria is accepting malaria; it's making peace with malaria; it's rich countries saying: 'We don't need to eradicate malaria around the world as long as we've eliminated malaria in our own countries.' That's just unacceptable."

--from The Whole In Our Gospel: The Answer that Changed My Life and Might Just Change the World," by Richard Stearns, Thomas Nelson, 2009, pp. 143-145