Hot ‘Climategate’ debate: Scientists clash LIVE on RT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anHuOAXIl0M

Pierce Corbyn and Aleksey Kokorin became involved in a heated argument in that debate, over the incidence of malaria in Russia.

Aleksey Kokorin (a Russian warmist activist) implied that Pierce Corbyn (an astrophysicist renowned for making accurate, long-range weather predictions) cannot be correct with respect to stating that malaria was endemic in Russia’s North during the Little Ice Age, because Pierce Corbyn is not a medical doctor.  However, one does not have to be a medical doctor to be able to refer to the facts of medical science.  Aleksey Kokorin is in denial of those facts, Pierce Corbyn is correct, and knowledge once more trumps climate hysteria . It is not necessary to have extraordinarily high temperatures for malaria to thrive in temperate zones.

CDC — Perspectives
From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age

Paul Reiter
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol6no1/pdf/reiter.pdf (792 kB)

Dr. Reiter’s article states:

Until the second half of the 20th century, malaria was endemic and widespread in many temperate regions, with major epidemics as far north as the Arctic Circle…. [p. 1]

During the Medieval Warm Period, mention of malarialike illness was common in the European literature from Christian Russia to caliphate Spain: “As one who has the shivering of the quartan so near,/ that he has his nails already pale/ and trembles all, still keeping the shade,/ such I became when those words were uttered.” (The Inferno, Dante [1265-1321])….[p. 3]

*Malaria Species*
P. vivax and P. falciparum both have a tertian periodicity, so it is unclear which species was responsible for tertiary ague in England. P. vivax can persist for many years as a dormant hypnozoite in the liver, giving rise to occasional clinical relapses (caused by production of the blood stages of the parasite), whereas there is no evidence of hypnozoites in P. falciparum.
Twentieth-century studies in Russia and Holland showed that some strains of P. vivax from the northern hemisphere—given the subspecific name P. vivax hibernans—did not produce clinical symptoms until 8-9 months after the infective bite….[p. 5]

Laboratory studies have shown that tropical strains of P. falciparum do not multiply in European mosquitoes. However, European strains did cause major epidemics in Russia and Poland in the 1920s, with high death rates as far north as Archangel, Russia….[p. 6]

Rural populations declined as manual labor was replaced by machinery, further reducing the availability of humans as hosts for both mosquitoes and parasites. New building materials and improved methods of construction made houses more mosquito-proof, especially in winter, thus reducing the risk for contact with mosquitoes. Greater access to medical care and a rapid drop in the cost of quinine reduced the survival rate of the malaria parasite in its human host.
A similar decline occurred in the more prosperous countries of Europe—Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, and northern Italy. However, malaria maintained a much firmer grip on Eastern Europe—Finland, Poland and Russia, and the countries bordering the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. It was not until the advent of DDT, after World War II, that a concerted attempt could be made to eradicate the disease from the entire continent (30). At the same time, the Communicable Disease Center (forerunner of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) was set up in Atlanta to eliminate malaria from the United States, where it was still endemic in 36 states (27), including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey….[p. 9]

It has been estimated that more than 500 construction workers (not counting their wives and children) died of malaria during the construction of the Rideau Canal in Canada, in the early 1800s, long before the end of the Little Ice Age.

During the construction of the Rideau Canal, a temperate form of malaria, P. Vivax, was present. This was the form indigenous to southern Ontario at the time. It has two cycles, the normal short (weeks) malaria cycle and a much longer cycle where it would spend nine months or longer incubating in the liver of a human. This longer cycle allowed it to survive the harsh Canadian winter by staying inside a human until the mosquitoes were out and biting again. P. Vivax has a very low mortality rate (essentially 0%) since it infects far fewer red blood cells than other forms of malaria. One explanation for the 2 to 4% mortality rate on the Rideau is that those who died were either suffering from other illnesses of the day, or had health issues such as dysentery, and that getting infected with P.Vivax was the last straw. An alternate, but perhaps less likely explanation, is that P. falciparum, a more virulent tropical malaria, was also present. P. falciparum, introduced into the U.S. with the African slave trade, doesn’t have the ability to over-winter in Canada, so, if it was present, it must have been re-introduced each year.

Groupings of people, such as in the canal construction camps, certainly helped the spread of the disease, allowing mosquitoes to easily transmit the disease from one worker to another. Many of the construction areas were near clear standing water swamps, ideal egg-laying areas for the mosquito. No one escaped from malaria, everyone from the highest-ranking officer to the wives and children of immigrant labourers all suffered from it. It was most prevalent in the southern Rideau, within the range of the anopheles mosquito. There are no definitive records regarding how many deaths due to malaria occurred during the building of the Rideau Canal. Surviving records indicate an on-site mortality (death) rate of about 2% and a morbidity (sickness) rate of about 60%. Many left the work sites during the “sickly month” (August) so the actual mortality rate is likely higher, perhaps up to 4%. One educated guess (Passfield) is that upwards of 500 men (excluding women and children) died as a result of malaria contracted while working on the Rideau Canal. (Full Story)

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