The Fever Quotes

“The World Bank, which had become the developing world’s single largest source of healthcare financing, considered free public health programs a thing of the past, and so required debtor countries to decentralize their health services and encourage privately run clinics and hospitals to sell health care to those consumers willing to pay.5 In Zaire, more than eighty thousand clinicians and teachers were fired under World Bank and IMF strictures in a single year. In Zambia, within just two years of such programs, infant mortality rose by 25 percent while life expectancy dropped from fifty-four to forty years.6”
― Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

“The shrub mululuza is one of many plants with secondary compounds that provide relief from malaria. Chimpanzees chew on its bitter leaves, as did our African ancestors, suggesting the curious idea that our knowledge of botanical malaria medicines—like malaria itself—may have survived the evolutionary hop from ape to human.5 Clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, basil, and onion similarly all assuage Plasmodium’s appetite, making the body’s repair of damage from free radicals—oxygen molecules untethered to hemoglobin—more difficult. This, paradoxically, can help destroy malaria parasites by exposing infected cells to the armies of free radicals that malaria infection unleashes, and may explain why for millennia people sought out and added these nutritionally empty products to their diets.”
― Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

“Living in Virginia required suffering what residents called a “seasoning”—that is, “two or three small fits of a feaver and ague,” as one settler wrote in 1687.20”
― Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

“One simple reason for malaria’s ferocity is that the protozoan creature that causes the disease is, by definition, a cheater at the game of life. It is a parasite, a creature that can eke out its livelihood only by depleting others of theirs. The rest of us all do our obscure little part in the drama of life, weaving ourselves deeper into local ecology and strengthening its fabric, the bees pollinating the flowers, predators culling the herds of their weakest members. Parasites don’t help anyone. They’re degenerates.”
― Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years