IELTS Reading Answers Part One
Malaria. Bad air. Even the word is Italian, and this horrible disease marked the life of those in the peninsula for thousands of years. Giuseppe Garibaldi’s wife died of the disease, as did the country’s first Prime Minister, Cavour, in 1861. Yet by 1962, Italy was officially declared malaria-free, and it has remained so ever since.
Frank Snowden’s study of this success story is a remarkable piece of historical work. Original, crystal-clear, analytical and passionate, Snowden (who has previously written about cholera ) takes us to areas historians have rarely visited before.
Part Two
Everybody now knows that malaria is carried by mosquitoes. Malaria has always been the subject of research for medical practitioners from time immemorial. However, many ancient texts, especially medical literature, mention various aspects.
Early man, confronting the manifestations of malaria, attributed the fevers to supernatural influences: evil spirits, angered deities, or the black magic of sorcerers. But in the 19th century, most experts believed that the disease was not produced by unclean air (“miasma” or “poisoning of the air”). Two Americans, Josiah Clark Nott and Louis Daniel Beauperthy, echoed Crawford’s ideas.
Nott in his essay ” Yellow Fever Contrasted with Bilious Fever,” published in 1850, dismissed the miasma theory as worthless, arguing that microscopic insects somehow transmitted by mosquitoes caused both malaria and yellow fever. Others linked swamps, water, and malaria, but did not make the further leap toward 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.!
Part Three
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.
Every year, during the mosquito season, malarial blood is 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.