262 



MALARIA 



" What for practical purposes may be regarded as 

 an experiment of the same kind, is being conducted 

 in West Africa. Dr Elliot, a member of the 

 Liverpool expedition sent to Nigeria some time 

 ago to investigate the subject of malarial fever, has 

 recently returned to this country. He reports that 

 the members of the expedition have been perfectly 

 well, although they have spent four months in some 

 of the most malarious spots. They lived practi- 

 cally amongst marshes and other places hitherto 

 supposed to be the most deadly. They have not 

 kept the fever off by the use of quinine, and they 

 attribute their immunity to the careful use of 

 mosquito-nets at night." {British Medical Journal, 

 22nd September 1900.) 



A similar "experiment," of the utmost import- 

 ance, was made in 1900 by Professor Grassi. It 



spot ascertained by Dr L. Sambon, after careful inquiry, to be 

 intensely malarial, where the permanent inhabitants all 

 suffer from malarial cachexia, and where the field-labourers, 

 who come from healthy parts of Italy to reap the harvest, 

 after a short time all contract fever. This fever-haunted spot 

 is in the King of Italy's hunting-ground near Ostia, at the 

 mouth of the Tiber. It is waterlogged and jungly, and teems 

 with insect life. The only protection employed against 

 mosquito-bite and fever by the experimenters who occupied 

 this hut was mosquito-netting, wire screens in doors and 

 windows, and, by way of extra precaution, mosquito-nets round 

 their beds. Not a grain of quinine was taken. They go 

 about the country quite freely — always, of course, with an 

 eye on Anopheles — during the day, but are careful to be indoors 

 from sunset to sunrise. Up to 21st September, the date of 

 Dr Sambon's last letter to me, the experimenters and their 

 servants had enjoyed perfect health, in marked contrast to 

 their neighbours, who were all of them either ill with fever, 

 or had suffered malarial attacks." 



