Malaria in the Ohio Valley

Chapter 5.1: Elias Samuel Cooper and 19th Century Medicine: "Although present as a devastating pestilence throughout Eurasia and Africa from the earliest historic times, the New World was free of malaria until around 1500. At about this time it was brought to the Americas from Europe and Africa by the Spaniards and their slaves whose red blood cells, infected with the malarial parasite, were taken up by the bite of the ubiquitous Anopheles mosquitoes and transmitted thereby to an endless chain of human carriers. [13] The disease was unknown among the Indians in the Ohio Valley and the Northwest until after the arrival there of European immigrants. In Illinois, the incidence of malaria was at a low level from the first settlements in about 1700 until 1760 when it rose within a decade to epidemico-endemic proportions and held that position for about 80 years. It then began a slow decline in the 1850's, and virtually disappeared from the state by 1900."