Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

Since the adoption of settled agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago, malaria has killed so many people that it is the “strongest known force for evolutionary selection in the recent history of the human genome.”[27]

Although John McNeill is careful not to completely ignore the role of Great Men like George Washington, he drolly suggests that the female Anopheles quadrimaculatus mosquitoes should be considered one of the “founding mothers of the United States.” As he points out, malaria killed eight times more British troops than American guns.

Since 2015, life expectancy at the national level has been in decline. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton and his collaborator Anne Case point out that this is driven by an increase in suicides, alcohol abuse and drug overdoses, which kill about 190,000 people each year—three times more than in the 1990s.