Years of studies and data collection will still be needed to understand what effects the Covid pandemic has had on society and the economy. There is, however, at least in Italy and specifically in Sardinia, a historical precedent that can serve to understand how infectious diseases have much broader and more lasting consequences than those that are noticed immediately, when attention is focused on the health emergency. It is these consequences that were investigated in the second edition of the “Antonio Pigliaru Workshop”, which was held in Cagliari in recent days. After the 2022 edition, dedicated to Code of barbaric revenge and cultural codes in general, this edition focuses on malaria, another phenomenon that has characterized the social and economic history of Sardinia.
The analysis
Starting from the analysis of the emblematic case of the island, whose past is characterized by a great prevalence of malaria and by as many efforts to eradicate it, the conference focused on the way in which infectious diseases shape the development of the territories concerned, on how the energy taken away from the population, unable to work and study due to the pathology, affects every area of social life.
In fact, among the speakers there are world-renowned historians, sociologists, economists and infectious diseases specialists (here is the complete programme). “Every year, malaria causes the death of 600 thousand people and threatens 40% of the world’s population. – he explains Claudio Deianaprofessor at the University of Cagliari, among the organizers of the conference – Its spread is not limited to the tropical areas of South America, Africa and Asia, but also affects industrialized countries, through people who contract it in endemic areas, or are forced to migrate because of it.”
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Social adaptation
“Besides the high healthcare costs, – he underlines – malaria has caused significant social adaptation phenomena. In agricultural communities, for example, the need to avoid infection has influenced settlements, farm locations, land use and agricultural practices. These strategies have had profound impacts on production, with significant, and not always positive, consequences on the wealth and income distribution of the affected societies.” “These systemic effects persist today. A better understanding of these phenomena can illuminate the changes that mark the past, present and future, especially in a world where the risk of epidemics transmitted by vectors sensitive to climate and environmental changes, and in particular to variations in temperature and humidity, is always taller”, concludes Deiana.
An island story
A brief summary of the history of malaria in Sardinia gives an idea of why the Italian case is a mine for the reconstruction of the social and economic dynamics resulting from the spread of the disease and its subsequent eradication. Among the various attempts to eradicate it, the best known is the Sardinian Project, conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation in the years 1946-1950. Despite not being able to completely eliminate the mosquito Anopheles labranchiaethe project drastically reduced mortality.
Until that moment, the disease had in some years and at peak times killed up to 2 thousand people a year, as reported for example by the first data collected by the senator and Minister of Agriculture Luigi Torelli after the unification of Italy. Torelli published the Illustrated map of malaria in Italy, which shows how the red zones of the island occupy a large part of the 1849 kilometers of coastline, but also internal areas. The areas where mosquitoes proliferate are the Cagliari area, the upper Campidano, the lower Gallura, the Nurra (Alghero-Sassari) and malaria is present in 316 out of 364 municipalities in the region, i.e. in 87% of the latter. On the island, where one Italian in forty lives, there is one death in five of the national total.
Such a wide diffusion does not only imply a health burden. There is a story entitled precisely Malaria by Giuseppe Verga, (Sicily was with Sardinia among the most affected Italian regions and the last epidemic outbreak occurred in 1956 in Palma di Montechiaro), which well describes what happens to people who fight against the parasite inoculated by the mosquito: ” It’s that malaria enters your bones with the bread you eat, and if you open your mouth to speak, while walking along streets suffocating with dust and sun, you either feel weak in the knees, or you collapse on the saddle of the mule going to the I walk, with my head down.” That “collapsing on the pack” is a metaphor for bodies exhausted by illness that can no longer work, that do not have the strength to think about the future, it is the metaphor of resources forever taken away from society.
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In the conference organized by Alberto Bisin (New York University), Claudio Deiana (University of Cagliari), Luigi Guiso (EIEF), Mario Macis (Johns Hopkins University), Marco Nieddu (University of Cagliari) e Francesco Pigliaru (University of Cagliari) with the financial support of the Sardinia Foundation, some of the reports have demonstrated precisely how the persistence of malaria has consequences that reach us and how, particularly in Sardinia, the disease has slowed down a virtuous use of countryside, blocking the first elements of agricultural development.
From Sardinia to the world
What happened in Sardinia is still a plague that slows down the growth of many areas, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and Global estimates indicate that in countries with high transmission the disease can have a negative impact of up to 1.3% on annual economic growth. The connection with what happened during the Covid epidemic is clear, since there was an unprecedented collective effort to tackle the coronavirus and this effort must also be extended to the fight against malaria.
The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, present at the conference with the speaker Bruno Moonen, already underlined in 2022: “We are able to strengthen health systems, introduce innovations in the prevention and treatment of malaria and start a rapid decrease in cases if donors and malaria-endemic countries increase their investments now and give priority to eradicating the disease, even in the face of the Covid emergency. The warning is clear, and was at the center of the Cagliari conference: study the historical evolution of the fight against malaria and its economic and social consequences also means analyzing prospects and challenges for the future, and understanding the level of preparation to deal with possible pandemics of infectious diseases.
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