Race for the cure.

• Author: Franke-Ruta, Garance
• Position: Political Booknotes

THE FEVER TRAIL: In Search of the Cure For Malaria by Mark Honigsbaum Farrar Straus Giroux, $25.00

IN THE LATE '90S, RELATIONS between African nations and American pharmaceutical companies were roiled by arguments that exclusive American patents on expensive AIDS drugs were leading to thousands of deaths in AIDS-plagued Third World nations that couldn't afford the treatments. Meanwhile, cheaper generic versions of the anti-viral drugs were being manufactured in Brazil and India. South Africa led the charge against the Americans by announcing it would ignore the patents and import the generics; the pharmaceutical firms cried foul and sued to retain rights to their intellectual property. In the end, humanitarianism won. The firms ceded their case after an international outcry, and President Bill Clinton gave AIDS-afflicted, impoverished countries the green light to import medications cheaply from wherever they could, regardless of the patent rules. It was an international public health emergency, after all.

The conflict between the drug companies and disease-ravaged Third World nations seemed to mark a new low by greedy American medical corporations, apparently indifferent to human suffering. But when it comes to the treatment of epidemic disease, the conflict between commerce and humanitarianism is nothing new. Some 150 years ago, a similar conflict over a critical treatment for an international scourge pitted Americans against the health needs of India, Africa, and Europe. But the last time around, the scourge was malaria, and the Americans seeking to keep a tight rein on their profitable treatment were South Americans in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.

Variously known an "intermittent fever" or "ague," malaria had been endemic in the marshy, fenny lowlands of Europe and Africa for millennia. But soon after the colonization of America, the mosquito-borne malady made itself at home in swampy jungles and marshy plains all the way from Patagonia to New York City. The American role in the story begins in 1663, writes Mark Honigsbaum, a former chief reporter for London's The Observer, in his first book, The Fever Trail. That year, a tale began circulating in Europe about a Spanish Contessa who had been miraculously cured of an intermittent fever while in Lima, the capital of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. A Jesuit missionary had reportedly given her an indigenous infusion made from something the Indians called quina quina, "bark of barks," or ayac...