ENDNOTES One Mosquito Bite Away from Colonization: Malaria Resistance in Africa due to Sickle Cell Anemia
In the early 1600s, Europeans successfully colonized the Americas. However, deadly diseases such as yellow fever and malaria stalled their conquest of Africa at the continent’s coast. While Europeans vindicated this anomaly with pseudo-scientific racism, modern science shows that high frequencies of the genetic disease sickle-cell anemia gave Africans a resistance to malaria that Europeans did not possess. It was not until the discovery of the antimalaria drug quinine that Europeans were able to survive malaria and move their colonization project further into the interior of Africa, demonstrating the importance of understanding the role of science in history. In the eighteenth century an estimated thirty to seventy percent of Europeans died each year from various diseases while travelling to Africa; Europeans were quick to blame these high death rates on race.1 Diseases like sleeping sickness, worms, dysentery, yellow fever, and malaria were common to African regions.2 However, the eighteenth-century medical community struggled to rationalize the cause of the diseases. Ancient Roman and Greek philosophers created the miasma theory which hypothesised that tiny animals who dwelled in swampy places could enter the body via the air and cause illness. Through this theory “bad air” became an explanation for malaria epidemics, especially in swampy West Africa.3 Europeans noticed that malaria mostly affected white men to the extent that Sierra Leone became known as “White Man’s Grave,” and they began to attribute race as an explanation for infection.4 Pseudo-scientific racism emerged with the idea that different races of men were created by God as different species in a hierarchy topped by white men.5 This meant that white men thought black people were not susceptible to malaria because they were a different species, plagued by a different subset of disease. However, high malaria rates can actually be attributed to West Africa’s ideal environment for mosquitoes in the genus Anopheles (Figure 1), which are vectors for the malaria causing parasite, Plasmodium.6 In a time before the microscopic causes of disease were known, Europeans wrongly believed that survival of malaria depended upon a person’s skin colour; however, modern population genetics and epidemiology have attributed African survival of malaria to the genetic disease, sickle cell anemia.
Figure 1: The Anopheles mosquito bites a human and exposes them to the Plasmodium parasite. Pexels.
