Mauvais Air

Published at the occasion of the exhibition Mauvais Air, on the Pont des Arts Bridge in Paris on September 2008.

The word malaria comes from Italian meaning “bad air” (Mauvais air in French). In Roman times, people believed that this strong fever was caused by the nauseating air from the swamps around Rome. In reality, the malaria parasite is transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito. This disease is one of the world’s worst scourges: it causes over 1 million deaths a year, 80% of them occurring in sub-Saharan Africa mainly among pregnant women and children under five. Every 30 seconds, a child dies from malaria. The WHO (World Health Organization) estimates that between 300 and 500 million clinical cases occur every year. According to some studies, this endemic cost affected countries, many of them already very poor, 12 billion dollars a year.