The Fever

How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

| 4.24 | 1,193 ratings and reviews

Recommended by Bill Gates, Sue Desmondhellmann, and 2 others. See all reviews

Ranked #10 in Forensic Medicine, Ranked #26 in Microbiology — see more rankings.

In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names — and opened their pocketbooks — in hopes of curing the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren’t we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we’ve known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly one million of them?

In The Fever, the journalist Sonia... more
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We've comprehensively compiled reviews of The Fever from the world's leading experts.

Bill Gates CEO/MicrosoftIf you want to read just one book about malaria, The Fever is probably the best choice. Author Sonia Shah doesn’t overwhelm you with data and analytics, but she does cover the whole history of the disease, which—as the title suggests—goes back further than you might think. The book was published in 2010, so it’s not totally up to date (most notably, we’ve made progress with rolling out bed nets since then). But it’s a great overview of malaria, its impact, and the solutions to it. (Source)

Sue Desmondhellmann Here’s one for your #SummerReadingList 📚: #TheFever by @soniashah is a terrific book that puts #malaria work into historic context- one of my favorite genres of writing. 🤓 https://t.co/uB6coVU5sf (Source)

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