Older books are using the phrase “smelled of Malaria”, “Malaria odorl”, “ or “damp miasma of Malaria”. Does the presence of Malaria give off a recognizable odor, or are they just smelling stuff present in the soil, that needs the same conditions?
Mal aria means, literally, bad air.
However, people suffering from malaria emit no distinctive odor.
If you go back far enough, you get before the point that we’d figured out malaria was caused by a parasite spread by mosquitoe bites. Back then, people did think it was caused by being in an unhealthy environment without too much specificity on what was unhealthy about it. So, no, I seriously doubt malaria really has its own smell.
Mosquitoes thrive in damp places, so that swampy, wet smell in a hot place would probably be “the smell of malaria,” right? That’s what I always assumed, anyway.
That’s what I’m thinking: It’s a reference to the smell of conditions once thought to cause the disease.
I expect to find it doesn’t have a smell. Some high concentrations of an organism do give off distintive odors as a biological process. I’m looking for an answer from somebody that knows, not speculation. Some illnesses also cause a very distinctive smell to eminate from the sufferer. I never see it refer to a person. It would be nice to know that one for sure also. The main queation still needs an answer. Does the area where Malaria is concentrated give off a distinctive odor because of the Malaria parasite? This is quoted for places in Englans and other locals, not just Africa.
Interestingly enough there has been some speculation that the malaria parasite might just alter the odor of hosts. But this would be in the context of affecting attractiveness to mosquitos and would be undetectable to us. In general the only odor you’d get off a malaria sufferer would be the sweaty funk of general malaise.
No, this is a protozoan blood parasite. They don’t exist outside of their extremely various hosts. These are absolutely ancient critters and different species infect every type of land vertebrate. Locally to me Plasmodium mexicanum causes malaria in the little western fence lizards ( “blue bellies” ) you see scurrying around on rocks.
This is because outside of tropical areas in particular, human malaria is typically associated with low-lying, swampy regions - i.e. places with high concentrations of mosquitos. And such areas do have that distinctive swampy smell of rotting vegetation and the like.
- Tamerlane
Some of my farorite areas are marshs, and I know the odor well. Thanks Tamerlane. I’ll consider this closed.