The Hiding Place

For half a century, doctors have known that infected mosquitoes spread malaria. The unsolved mystery has been: Where does the parasite that causes malaria hide out during the ten-day interval between the mosquito's bite and the appearance of the fever? An answer might cut down the world death rate from malaria, still nearly 2,000,000 victims a year.

Some ten years ago, Colonel Henry Edward Shortt, a British expert on tropical diseases, set out to find an answer. Last week he thought he had it: during the ten-day incubation, the parasite lurks in the liver.

No believer in hunches, Dr. Shortt tackled the puzzle with conventional research methods. In a laboratory near St. Albans, Hertfordshire, he shut a rhesus monkey into a cage with 500 malaria-carrying mosquitoes (previous experiments had used 20 to 100). Just to make sure that the monkey would hatch a really bad case, he killed the mosquitoes, made a solution out of them, and injected it into the monkey's muscles and chest. No other monkey had ever been so swamped with malaria. After seven days Dr. Shortt performed a careful autopsy. Said he: "I went over every conceivable piece of that monkey." In the monkey's liver he found the parasites, each one one-thousandth of an inch long.

Next problem was to find a human to check the experiment on. The parasite that causes monkey malaria (Plasmodium cynomolgi) is like the parasite that causes most human malaria (Plasmodlum vivax"). He found a mental patient who was about to be given malaria anyway for treatment of general paralysis. The patient and his wife agreed that doctors could take out a small piece of his liver by a minor operation, seven days after he had been bitten by infected mosquitoes. At 5 o'clock one morning Dr. Shortt got the sliver of liver, rushed to his laboratory and worked until 11 that night. Sure enough, he found the incubating malaria parasites.

Next step is to find a drug that will kill the parasites in the liver before they have time to erupt into the bloodstream. Dr. Shortt, 61, is willing to leave that detail to the chemists; he has an idea about African sleeping sickness that he wants to get right to work on.

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