Sunday, April 6, 2014

Malaria: The Least Poetic Disease

The anti-malaria initiative people working in Tanzania are continuing their valuable work of posting pictures to Facebook, advertising their Facebook events to Americans, and asking Americans to like their Facebook work.  It's a vast circle of awareness raising for and by Americans.

Ignoring the point that if the U.S. were reported on the way it reports on Africa, we'd be asked to raise awareness for the poor Americans dying of cancer, obesity, heart disease, and HIV, Facebook campaigns that appear to not have any actual goal other than generating likes do nothing to help malaria be more than the most boring of all deadly diseases.

Other deadly diseases are immortalized in song and story.  Most famously the Black Death, which spawned a Poe story, The Decameron, nursery rhymes, vampire superstitions, and an abiding place in the imagination.  Since a version of the plague is still extant in several places in the world, carried on squirrels and pigeons, I have had occasion to discuss the possibility of getting the plague.  I'm not in favor, but a friend would be willing just to be able to tell people he'd had the Black Death.  I'm not willing to go quite that far for the conversational advantage, but I sympathize.

More recently, tuberculosis is the preferred disease of the opera heroine and quite a few mysterious and brave anime heroes, e.g Ukitake, suffer from a disease which, while not specified, causes periodic coughing of blood.

HIV/AIDS gets artistic treatment in Rent cribbed straight from the tuberculin heroine of Puccini.  Also not opera cribbings in the form of critically acclaimed cinema, e.g. Angels in America and The Hours.  

Malaria has, as far as I can recall offhand, a mention by Laura Ingalls Wilder (who refers to it as fever and ague) and a cameo in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible.  Neither literary sketch of malaria has quite the effect on the imagination of Mimi or Violetta dying of tuberculosis, much less the partying nobles all succumbing to the plague at the entrance of the Red Death.

This is weird.  The anopheles mosquito is the deadliest animal in the world, and malaria is basically not completely preventable by, well, anything that doesn't completely destroy the environment. The U.S.  DDTed hell and guts out of the landscape and drained the wetlands to get rid of malaria.  Other than that, the futility of defending against a non-detectable mosquito ought to be at least slightly interesting, artistically.  But it's not.  Maybe if Manon died of malaria in the swamps of Louisiana that would help, but frankly, I love that she dies in the desert right outside New Orleans.
So.  Making malaria at least as interesting as Ebola, which makes the news for killing far fewer people than malaria has.  Any obvious way to do that?  Am I missing obvious great works of art that feature malaria?

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