Once bitten

Imagine, a disease we've known how to prevent and cure for over a century that still infects five-hundred million people every year, killing nearly one million of them. In recent years, malaria has made headlines as the cause-celebe of a wide range of luminaries and philanthropists. But the reality is that millions of dollars are going toward mosquito bed nets that will never be used, funding wars are compromising the work of leading researchers, and many people in the worlds most malarious countries still view the disease as a benign affliction like the common cold or flu. These are the questions that journalist Sonia Shah sets out to tackle in The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, her look at malaria and its effect on human lives. My conversation with Sonia Shah: