The Atlantic's Ellen Ruppel Shell wrote about the resurgence of malaria in 1997. Here's her opening paragraph:
DEPENDING on one's perspective, the struggle to gain dominion
over malaria can be seen either as a primer of the possible in
infectious-disease control or as classic tragedy. All but obliterated in
the developed world half a century ago, and suppressed in the Third World
in the 1950s and 1960s, malaria has since returned in full force to North
Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China, South America, and the Caribbean.
Worldwide incidence of the disease has quadrupled in the past five years,
and resistance to available drugs for prevention and treatment is growing
rapidly. Nearly 40 percent of the world's population lives in regions where
malaria is endemic, and millions more live in areas that are encountering
the disease for the first time in decades. Europe has had outbreaks, and in
the United States 1,000 to 1,200 cases annually have been reported in
recent years. But the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention estimates that cases reported in the United
States represent only about half the actual incidence. Every year
approximately seven million American tourists and
business people spend time in regions where malaria is endemic, as do
military personnel and foreign visitors to the United States, and it is
likely that thousands arrive here with malaria parasites in their bodies.
As a consequence, locally
transmitted malaria, absent from the United States for roughly thirty
years, has returned. Since 1988 locally transmitted malaria has appeared in
California, Texas, Michigan, Florida, New Jersey, and New York City.
Anopheles mosquitoes -- members of the genus that carries malaria
parasites -- are common almost everywhere in the United States and,
for that matter, in most populated regions of the world.
The article is long, comprehensive, and pretty depressing.
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