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On Wednesday 29/1/2003
Robert Sallares
Summary:
Malaria and Rome
Details or Transcript:
Today people living in developed countries regard malaria as a tropical disease.
But in developing countries it still kills many children, causes permanent brain damage to survivors of childhood infections, alters the age structure of populations, and reduces per capita income and growth rates.
Yet until not much more than fifty years ago malaria was widespread in Europe and the southern parts of the United States. History shows that malaria used to have very severe effects in what are now highly developed countries.
For over two thousand years malaria was endemic in the countryside of central Italy around Rome. The Roman orator Cicero tells us that Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, chose a healthy location in a pestilential region for his new city. The famous seven hills of Rome were healthy because mosquitoes, the vectors of malaria, only fly at low altitudes. However in the lowlands surrounding the city of Rome, where much of the population lived, malaria had as great an impact on the economy and the population as it does today in tropical Africa.
In the second century BC Cato the Elder, one of the earliest Roman historians, indicated that building a villa in an unhealthy location in summer, the malaria season, would increase the cost of the construction work by a quarter.
The chronic ill-health produced by malaria led many of the Romans to want to migrate away from their own homes. We are told that when the Romans invaded Campania, the region around Naples, in the fourth century BC in their first major excursion outside their homeland of Latium, the Roman soldiers did not want to return home after the end of the war because while the farms in Campania were healthy, their own in Latium were very much unhealthy. That was the beginning of the Roman Empire.
As the Romans vacated their own farms around Rome to acquire an empire, a labour shortage developed on fertile agricultural lands around the city. Ironically, malaria was most intense in the areas with the best land for agriculture. The Romans solved the labour problem by importing large numbers of barbarian slaves, who were forced to work in the fields in chain-gangs, under the whip. A whole economy based on mass chattel slavery developed in the countryside around Rome, as a response to malaria.
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, malaria continued to flourish around Rome. The disease became known as "Roman fever" because it was so characteristic of the area around Rome during the Middle Ages. After the Romans ceased to be capable of defending themselves against external attacks, malaria frequently came to their aid. Many French and German armies invaded Italy, sat down to besiege Rome, and were destroyed outside the walls of the city by devastating malaria epidemics.
Nevertheless, even though malaria had uses at times, its social and economic effects meant that it had to be eradicated in order for modernisation to occur. Mussolini claimed the credit for eradicating malaria from the region around Rome in the 1930s. The disease was eliminated from Italy by a combination of draining the marshes where mosquitoes reproduced, by the increased use of antimalarial drugs, and by the application of the insecticide DDT. These solutions were specific to particular places and times. The mosquitoes which transmit malaria in Africa today do not breed in marshes, and are developing resistance to DDT, while the parasites are also evolving drug resistance.
The historical record for Europe demonstrates what we can only surmise in the case of Africa, given the scarcity of documentary evidence relating to tropical Africa before European colonisation commenced. Plasmodium falciparum, the most dangerous of the four species of human malaria, had an extraordinary impact over a very long period of time on the development of civilisation, particularly in southern Europe. In Africa, where it evolved, it probably had an even greater impact. Indeed it is very likely that the presence of endemic malaria in Africa is a major reason why civilisation failed to develop in antiquity in the part of the world where Homo sapiens evolved.
Guests on this program:
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Robert Sallares: Research Fellow at the University of Manchester�s Institute of Science and Technology.
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