Orville Taylor, Contributor

Last year it killed more than a million people. In Latin America and the Caribbean there was around that number infected. Without treatment, it kills you faster than AIDS. Its symptoms are like flu, with a recurrent fever and pain. However, it can be cured. So let's cure some ignorance and speak some truth.

When it was first discovered in the medieval era even before Europeans went into the tropics no one knew how it was caused. Thus, some ignoramus labelled it malaria from the two Latin words; mal, meaning bad and aria meaning air, because it was assumed to be caused by bad air from wetlands.

For several centuries it was misnomered 'swamp fever' or simple ague, because it seemed to prevail around marshes and was accompanied by high temperatures and tremors.

However, as science advanced the truth came out and it was realised that it was a little micro organism called plasmodium, a member of the protozoan family, which was creating havoc with the explorers. As knowledge increased, it was further revealed that this 'little but tallawah' parasite was like the Jamaican stowaways between the 1950s and 1970s, who used to paint themselves green while hiding in the holds of banana boats.

However, unlike the hapless idiots who either prematurely disembarked in Montego Bay or Port Antonio, or failed to ripen like the bananas on arriving in England, the hitchhiker travelled in the saliva of a little relative of the housefly called mosquito, which is Latin and Spanish for 'little fly.' In the late 1800s a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, who did pioneering work on yellow fever, was the first to link mosquitoes to the transmission of disease.

Later, Ronald Ross definitively demonstrated that malaria was passed as saliva, laced with an anti-coagulant, entered the human blood stream while preventing blood clots. Ross, was however never praised for his research although he received the Nobel Prize for his work on malaria.

Greek tragedy

Finally, the world knew, malaria is caused by a little germ, passed after a female mosquito sucks a mammal or bird that has it. The particular culprit who traffics the microbe is called anopheles. Anopheles is not Latin, it is Greek and it means worthless and hurtful. However, as Virgil said in his poem, Aeneid, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

I bet you thought that the proverb was from the Bible, but it was written more than 20 years before Christ was born.

Anyway, the little critter is bigger than the 'common' one who is domiciled here and like other Europeans who came during colonialism, is not very hardy and requires specialised habitats. It is not like our aedes aegypti mosquito, the dengue fever germs mule, who is our local terrorist. The word aegypti means 'citizen of Egypt,' and like the original black people who built the pyramids, it needs little water to breed. A tea cup, coconut shell, a discarded water boot, will more than accommodate its eggs after it has feasted on you. In simple terms our dengue banton is a ragamuffin. For the record, no male aegypti mosquito sucks anything except fruits, although some idle propagandists have suggested that they have seen a few do it.

Nonetheless, anopheles requires larger water deposits; a pond, slow or stagnant water near the river bank, the clogged culvert and drain, a gully or a small pool that gathers near to the community standpipe or the temporary swamps in peoples' yards in Pagee after the recent St Mary floods. It also does not mind the water in the potholes created due to poor contracting by central and local government and the National Works Agency (NWA).

Strangely, the malaria vector likes water that is green, although curiously, it is appearing in areas which are both green and orange. Like the homeless and persons who have not been re-verified, its impact is felt across political boundaries.

Inasmuch as the Ministry of Health is trying to manage the situation and I know that Horace will not Dalley from this one - there is a crisis. At the time of writing there have been 50 confirmed cases. One of my friends in my base community in Kingston 20 is recovering from the disease. So it is not confined to Kingston 12, 13 and 14.

Malaria is not transmitted by rats like leptospirosis, it is not contagious like flu or chicken pox, it can only be passed by an adult female anopheles sucking an infected victim and then biting another. This means that the only way this disease, that was eliminated from here around the same year we became independent, could resurface was if (i) infected persons entered the country and most important (ii) if adult female anopheles followed them here.

Without anopheles the germ cannot be passed from person to person. So it does not matter if a million infected Haitians, Colombians, Guyanese or Jamaicans imported the microbe in their blood. You need mosquitoes to pass it on and our local ones cannot do it.

This is where the challenge is because to control and eliminate the threat we have to kill all the adults by fogging or insecticides. That is difficult enough. How are we going to prevent them from breeding in our large water deposits? What of the Black and Duhaney Rivers? What of the Martha Brae? How will we control breeding in water sources that feed into our domestic water supply without poisoning ourselves?

This is not a time for petty politicking, but call a spade a spade. I blame central and local government for the poor conditions of our roads and gullies, but I also blame you and me because we are too nasty.

Dr. Orville Taylor is senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the University of the West Indies, Mona.