The postmark on this card is Tuesday 25th February 1908 – the date Ronald Ross left Mauritius for England, having spent three months on the island to prepare an official report on measures for the prevention of malaria, while privately thinking about how epidemics can be explained in terms of mathematical principle.
CarnotCycle is a thermodynamics blog but occasionally it ventures into new areas. This post concerns the modeling of disease transmission.
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Calamity
In 1867, a violent epidemic of malaria broke out on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. In the coastal town of Port Louis 6,224 inhabitants out of a local population of 87,000 perished in just one month. Across the island as a whole there were 43,000 deaths out of a total population of 330,000. It was the worst calamity that Mauritius has ever suffered, and it had a serious impact on the island’s economy which in those days was principally generated by sugar cane plantations.
At the time, Mauritius was ruled by the British. The island had little in the way of natural resources, but perhaps because of its strategic position for Britain’s armed forces, the government was keen to keep the malaria problem under observation. Medical statistics show that following the great epidemic of 1867, deaths from malaria dropped to zero by the end of the century.
In the first years of the 20th century however, a small but significant rise in deaths from malarial fever was observed. And in May 1907 the British Secretary of State for the Colonies requested Ronald Ross, Professor of Tropical Medicine at Liverpool University, to visit Mauritius in order to report on measures for the prevention of malaria there. Ross sailed from England in October 1907 and arrived in Mauritius a month later. (more…)
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