Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

Falciparum malaria first appeared in Virginia and South Carolina in the mid-1680s—that is, just before African American slavery began to catch on in the North American colonies.[57] The timing is not an accident. As with so many other disease outbreaks we’ve encountered in this book, it coincided with a period of climate disruption. In this case, El Niño events were much more frequent in the 1680s than in the preceding two decades, which may have aided the spread of malaria by creating the stagnant pools of water in which Anopheles mosquitoes need to breed.[58] The climate influenced the distribution of malaria in North America in another important way: as Plasmodium falciparum requires long stretches of relatively warm temperature in order to reproduce, it could survive in the southern colonies but not in the northern ones. In fact, the geographical boundary between areas where the parasite could and couldn’t reproduce falls more or less exactly on the Mason-Dixon Line that divided Maryland from Pennsylvania and Delaware.[59] In the south, agricultural workers who hadn’t developed immunity to falciparum malaria were likely to get very sick. As a result, European indentured laborers were no longer wanted, and nor did they want to settle there.[60] From an amoral economic perspective, West African labor suddenly became a much more appealing proposition for plantation owners. The Italian economist Elena Esposito estimates that the arrival of falciparum malaria in the 1680s e...