The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind For 500,000 Years - Plot & Excerpts
THE KARMA OF MALARIA According to studies on risk perception, people are most frightened of unknown risks and least frightened of familiar ones. That’s true even when the unknown risk is minimal and the familiar risk is colossal. Take the neurodegenerative cattle ailment Mad Cow Disease. It affected a few cows in Germany in 2000, and 85 percent of the German public considered it a serious threat to public health. In contrast, cars kill three thousand people every day the world over. We continue to drive them, thoughtlessly and with abandon.1 We take only the most trivial precautions—strapping on a seat belt, perhaps—and even that, to be fair, we do under threat of penalty. For the people who live with Plasmodium, the risk of malaria isn’t just numbingly familiar. In their lived experience they know that the overwhelming majority of the parasite’s incursions are trivial. Most of the time, carrying the parasite means next to nothing: no fever, no chills, no readily discernible symptoms, especially against a gray backdrop of other, more pressing ailments.
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