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LISTENING COMPREHENSION PART 2 You are going to hear a report about malaria. For questions 1- 5, answer the multiple choice questions. There is an example (0-B) at the beginning. You will hear the recording twice.

MALARIA Example:
What does professor Humphries say about young Americans as regards malaria?

A. They all realise the importance of the disease. B. They dont understand how serious the disease was. C. They dont want to hear about it. 1. How did the disease first spread in the USA? A. It is not really known. B. It is thought it had always been there. C. Colonists brought it from abroad. 2. The real scientific cause of malaria A. was already known to the Romans. B. is bad fumes. C. wasnt discovered until the 19th century. 3. According to Bob Words, what was the main cause for its eradication? A. The general improvement of living conditions. B. The development of education. C. Scientific discoveries. 4. As malaria continued in the South, what did the government do? A. They set up an eradiation campaign with DDT. B. They paid scientists to find a remedy. C. Their program did not really reach the infected areas. 5. What happened as a result of the governments program? A. It was not a real success. B. Many people were opposed to it. C. The USA was declared a malaria-free country. 6. The campaign of the WHO (World Health Organisation) in Africa A. was a complete failure. B. was successful in the whole continent. C. was opposed by several African countries.

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7. At present, the fight against malaria concentrates on A. getting the funds for investigation. B. finding a vaccine. C. DDT spraying.

KEY MALARIA: 1C/ 2C/ 3A/ 4A/ 5C/ 6A/ 7B TAPESCRIPT MALARIA
Historian Margaret Humphries teaches History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She studies the history of disease. Humphries says most Americans today dont realise that a just a few generations ago, malaria was a big problem in the United States. M. Humphries: When my grandmother was told she was moving to Eastern Safe from Minnesota in 1938, she was afraid, afraid for her children that they were going to a place where they would get sick, and when I ask my students at Duke: Do any of you ever consider whether leaving Chicago or New Jersey means going to a place that is going to make you sick?, they all look at me with bewilderment. Malaria used to be a mark of the South. English colonists brought malaria to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. By fleeing the Old World for the New, they unwittingly brought the disease with them. It then spread across the continent. During the Civil War, malaria killed thousands of soldiers both in the Union and the Confederate armies. Malaria was then prevalent in the Mississippi Valley. For thousands of years, no one knew what malaria was or how it spread. The Romans thought the disease was carried by fumes emanating from swamps. The word malaria comes from the Italian for bad air. It wasnt until the late eighteen nineties that the scientists learnt that a parasite caused the disease, and that certain mosquitoes transmit the parasite from person to person. Bill Collins is a malaria expert with the US Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. The CDC was founded in 1946 specifically to help control malaria. Today the CDC has one of the few laboratories in the world that keeps mosquitoes infected with all 4 strains of human malaria. By the turn of the 20th century malaria had begun to disappear from many parts of the United States. CDC entomologist Bob Words says that as America became more industrialised, living conditions improved. B.W: Malaria is a disease of poverty. When you develop the infrastructures and the capabilities (people moving to screened houses or air-conditioning, clean up the environment, get rid of the breeding sites) then mosquito populations decrease and trnamittion is reduced. But malaria continued to plague the South-eastern United States long after the disease vanished elsewhere. Mosquitoes were simply more abundant in the South

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and the deep poverty there meant that sharecroppers cabins didnt evolve into the tight mosquito-proof houses that were being built in other parts of the country. So, in the late 1940s, the US Government launched a malaria eradication program focused on the South. National, State and Local officials drained swamps and wiped out other mosquito breeding grounds. They also sprayed the insecticide DDT in every Southern home. Historian Margaret Humphries says most people welcomed the spraying of DDT. Humphries says that people that may have had initial reservations about the campaign, were won over after they heard their neighbours singing the praise of DDT and by 1949, just a few years after the eradication campaign started, the United States were declared malaria-free. Malaria still crops up from time to time, but the sporadic cases are the result of travellers bringing in the disease from overseas. Following the defeat of malaria in the United States, the World Health Organisation launched an eradication effort of its own in the 1950s. The goal was to wipe out the disease across the Globe, through spraying, surveillance and the distribution of anti-malarian drugs. The plan worked well enough in places with temperate climates but problems developed in other parts of the world. Mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT and little effort was put to fight malaria in South-Saharan Africa. Bill Collins says it became to impractical to replicate the US model in the developing world. B.C: DDT is sprayed on walls. Most of the houses in Africa did not have walls. Where are you gonna spray? You had no organisation to hire spray workers go out into the area to do it. There was just no way to set up a program in these countries to hire spray workers to actually carry out the program. And in the late 1960s, the WHO conceded defeat. Some have argued that the eradication of malaria from the United States and Europe actually hurt the efforts in the developing world because rich nations no longer considered malaria a problem. But thats starting to change. International aid organisations are stepping up the distribution of anti-malarian drugs and bed-nets to protect against mosquitoes. Scientists worldwide are also working to develop malaria vaccines. They hope to help the thousands of millions of people that still fall ill from malaria each year, more than half a century after the disease became in the United States.