Mock Test 14.2 | Academic Reading

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-27, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

Malaria in Italy

A.   Everybody now knows that malaria is carried by mosquitoes. But in the 19th century, most experts believed that the disease was not produced by ”miasma” or “unclean air”. [Crack IELTS with Rob] Others made a link between swamps, water and malaria, but did not make the further leap towards insects. The consequences of these theories were that little was done to combat the disease before the end of the century. Things became so bad that 11m Italians (from a total population of 25m) were “permanently at risk”. In malarial zones, the life expectancy of land workers was a terrifying 22.5 years. Those who escaped death were weakened or suffered from splenomegaly – a “painful enlargement of the spleen” and “a lifeless stare”. The economic impact of the disease was immense. Epidemics were blamed on southern Italians, given the widespread belief that malaria was hereditary. In the 1880s, such theories began to collapse as the dreaded mosquito was identified as the real culprit.

B.   Italian scientists, drawing on the pioneering work of French doctor Alphonse Laveran, were able to predict the cycles of fever but it was in Rome that further key discoveries were made. Giovanni Battista Grassi, a naturalist, found that a particular type of mosquito was the carrier of malaria. By experimenting on healthy volunteers (mosquitoes were released into rooms where they drank the blood of the human guinea pigs), Grassi was able to make the direct link between the insects (all females of a certain kind) and the disease. Soon, doctors and scientists made another startling discovery: the mosquitoes themselves were also infected and not mere carriers. [Crack IELTS with Rob] Every year, during the mosquito season, malarial blood was moved around the population by the insects. Definitive proof of these new theories was obtained after an extraordinary series of experiments in Italy, where healthy people were introduced into malarial zones but kept free of mosquito bites – and remained well. The new Italian state had the necessary information to tackle the disease.

C.  A complicated approach was adopted, which made use of quinine – a drug obtained from tree bark which had long been used to combat fever but was now seen as a crucial part of the war on malaria. Italy introduced a quinine law and a quinine tax in 1904, and the drug was administered to large numbers of rural workers. Despite its often terrible side-effects (the headaches produced were known as the “quinine-buzz”), the drug was successful in limiting the spread of the disease, and in breaking cycles of infection. In addition, Italy set up rural health centers and invested heavily in education programs. Malaria, as Snowden shows, was not just a medical problem, but a social and regional issue, and could only be defeated through multi-layered strategies. Politics was itself transformed by the anti-malarial campaigns.

D.    It was originally decided to give quinine to all those in certain regions – even healthy people; peasants were often suspicious of the medicine being forced upon them. [Crack IELTS with Rob] Doctors were sometimes met with hostility and refusal, and many were dubbed “poisoners”. Despite these problems, the strategy was hugely successful. Deaths from malaria fell by some 80% in the first decade of the 20th century and some areas escaped altogether from the scourge of the disease.

E.   Shamefully, the Italian malaria expert Alberto Missiroli had a role to play in the disaster: he did not distribute quinine, despite being well aware of the epidemic to come. Snowden claims that Missiroli was already preparing a new strategy – with the support of the US Rockefeller Foundation – using a new pesticide, DDT. Missiroli allowed the epidemic to spread, in order to create the ideal conditions for a massive, and lucrative, human experiment. Fifty-five thousand cases of malaria were recorded in the province of Littoria alone in 1944. It is estimated that more than a bird of those in the affected area contracted the disease. Thousands, nobody knows how many, died.

F.    With the war over, the US government and the Rockefeller Foundation were free to experiment. DDT was sprayed from the air and 3m Italians had their bodies covered with the chemical. [Crack IELTS with Rob] The effects were dramatic, and nobody really cared about the toxic effects of the chemical. By 1962, malaria was more or less gone from the whole peninsula. The last cases were noted in a poor region of Sicily. One of the final victims to die of the disease in Italy was the popular cyclist, Fausto Coppi. He had contracted malaria in Africa in 1960, and the failure of doctors in the north of Italy to spot the disease was a sign of the times. A few decades earlier, they would have immediately noticed the tell-tale signs; it was later claimed that a small dose of quinine would have saved his life.

G.    As there are still more than 1m deaths every year from malaria worldwide, Snowden’s book also has contemporary relevance. This is a disease that affects every level of the societies where it is rampant. As Snowden writes: “In Italy, malaria undermined agricultural productivity, decimated the army, destroyed communities and left families impoverished.” The economic miracle of the 50s and 60s which made Italy into a modern industrial nation would not have been possible without the eradication of malaria. Moreover, this book convincingly argues that the disease was “an integral part of the big picture of modern Italian history”. [Crack IELTS with Rob] This magnificent study, beautifully written and impeccably documented, deserves an audience beyond specialists in history, or in Italy. It also provides us with “a message of hope for a world struggling with the great present-day medical emergency”.