Step up efforts to fight malaria in children

It is a bitter irony of history that the first thing to go global, in a “viral” way, was not something benevolent and useful to humans, like the idea of democracy or electricity, but rather devastating diseases. Tiny agents such as bacteria and viruses travelled on their human or animal host from continent to continent at the first opportunity that they had. The consequences were disastrous.  

One example is smallpox. The disease was previously unknown in the West, and only existed in the Eastern hemisphere. Notoriously, once Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean for the second time in 1493, the previously healthy inhabitants started to die en masse from this viral infection. Humans living in the East had developed some natural resistance against smallpox over the centuries, but natives of the Caribbean islands were completely unprotected. Even now, it is hard to comprehend the scale of the devastation – it is estimated that the islands’ population declined from more than one million to a mere 10,000 in a matter of years.