"In all probability, the day will come before long, when
newly-appointed officers for places like Lagos will have to
undergo a test as to whether they can tolerate quinine or not. A
man that cannot, or a man that will not, take quinine, should
not be sent to or remain in a malarial country, as he will be
doing so at the risk of his own life, _and to the danger of
others_.... The great difficulty is how to extend this treatment
beyond the service, more particularly to the uneducated masses
of the natives. It is simply impossible to protect the whole
population by quinine administered as a prophylactic. In the
first place, the great mass of natives would not take the
medicine; and, in the second place, the Government could not
afford to pay for the 70 tons of quinine a year that would be
required to give even a daily grain dose to each of 3,000,000 of
people."
2. _Segregation of Europeans from Natives._ This method is strongly
advocated by the members of the Nigeria Expedition of the Liverpool
School (1900). The distance of removal to half a mile is considered
sufficient: "Considerable evidence has now been accumulated to prove
that the distance which is traversed by a mosquito is never very
great, and extremely rarely reaches so much as half a mile." The
arguments in favour of this method of "segregation" are of so great
interest that they must be put here at some length. The drawback is
that the method cannot be followed everywhere to its logical issue
without some risk of giving offence, of seeming to abandon the native,
of damaging commerce, and so forth. But, short of this, much might be
done for the protection of Europeans in Africa:--
"This method is a corollary of the discovery that native
children in Africa practically all contain the malaria parasite,
and are the source from which Europeans derive malaria. Koch
showed in New Guinea that in most places infection was very
prevalent in native children, so much so that in some villages
100 per cent. of those examined contained parasites. He also
showed that, as the children increased in age, immunity was
produced, so that in the case of adults a marked immunity was
present, and malarial infection was absent. The Malaria
Commission showed, independently, that a condition of universal
infection existed among the children of tropical Africa,
associated with an immunity of the adults. This infection in
children had many remarkable characteristics. The children were
in apparent health, but often contained large numbers of
parasites, and a small proportion only of the children failed to
show some degree of infection.... The Liverpool School
Expedition found a similar condition of affairs in all parts of
Nigeria visited by them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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