There is a disease that annually sickens over one-half billion people, killing 1 million. Because of global warming, increasingly aggressive resource extraction, and growing multi-drug resistance, every year, the disease fells 16 percent more than it did the year before. By the turn of the century, this disease will be the world's most deadly contagion.

It isn't Ebola, or SARS, or avian influenza. It isn't multi-drug-resistant staphylococcus bacteria. It isn't AIDS. It's malaria, a wily parasite that has plagued humankind and shaped our lopsided world for millennia.