Woodcut from Hortus Sanitatis, 1491
The Malaria Consortium is putting on a 8-week exhibition of photographs featuring malaria at the UN headquarters in New York in advance of World Malaria Day on April 25. This weekend, the New York Times featured a selection of the photos, with a brief article on the history of the scourge. Check it out here.
The captions on the photos are the best part. Note that the mosquito-catching technique featured in slide 5 is pretty controversial. Using humans as live bait for malarial mosquitoes can certainly endanger them. I also found the quote on slide 9, which pictures two Nigerian children recovering from malaria (mostly naked, on a shorn mattress), quite telling. The father of the children describes their illness and treatment and then says, “It is not that we are not concerned, it is just normal.” A hint of the social reality of malaria in Africa, where people think of malaria the way we think of the flu–completely undermined by the story told by the dark, shadowy photograph alongside it.
