I do believe I’m going to buy the fixings for a nice gin and tonic this afternoon, because it’s going to be hot and humid. Thanks for a great story about the history of this drug. Fascinating stuff, and you covered it so thoroughly.

Want a story idea? When I was reading the bit about the Panama Canal, I couldn’t help thinking about the a aegypti mosquito that is a vector for so many tropical diseases including yellow fever.

While anti-malarial drugs played a big role in allowing the Panama Canal to be built, so did the importation of African laborers with levels of immunity to a aegypti vectored illness.

Indigenous Americans lacked immunity to those diseases, which European colonizers inadvertently introduced by bringing the mosquitoes over with them on slave ships.

Ironically, the colonizers themselves lack immunity, and given that indigenous Americans were dropping like flies as well, African workers, often de jure or de facto slaves, ended up providing much of the labor for colonial projects in Central and South America for centuries. The Panama Canal would not exist if workers of African origin had not supplied much of the labor.

All because of a mosquito. And racism. I’ll think about that as I sip my gin and tonic later, with a certain degree of ironic appreciation.