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Tiger Mosquitoes Tour Italia
by Ian Parnell, September 13, 2007
On September 13, 1321, the poet Dante died of malaria in Ravenna, Italy, after contracting the disease while on a diplomatic mission to Venice. It was nothing unusual to die of malaria in those times; several of Dante’s friends predeceased him from it. Though malaria had been present in Italy since before Roman times, it didn’t emerge as a problem in northeast, where Ravenna is, until medieval times when Anopheles sacharovi, a species mosquito capable of carrying the disease colonized the area. It probably arrived through the commercial trade Ravenna and Venice conducted with the dwindling Byzantine Empire to the east. Fortunately, in the centuries since then malaria disappeared from the Italian coastal lowlands.
Nature, however, has a sense of ironic timing and now, almost six hundred and eighty six years to the day since Dante’s death, a new mosquito born disease has emerged near Ravenna. While of great concern for public health, this event also provides an important example of how human trade, mobility and climate change can interact to create the ecological conditions and opportunities for the spread of invasive species and the diseases that travel with them; it illustrates the tight linkages between the ecological, economic and social components of our planet’s ecosphere. More...
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