Joe Kimble reviews The Fever Trail: the Hunt for the Cure for Malaria, by Mark Honigsbaum, £7.99, Macmillan

the fever trail recounts the heroic, gruesome and often doomed search for a cure, and later a vaccine, for malaria, which some parasitologists believe may have killed one out of every two humans who ever lived.

Malaria is passed into the bloodstream by the Anopheles mosquito, and having entered the bloodstream, "the threadlike malaria parasites (known as sporozoites) make straight for the liver, where they form a cyst and quietly replicate. Then two weeks later the cyst suddenly bursts and the young parasites (known as merozoites) invade the red blood corpuscles". After this come the familiar cold/dry, hot/dry and hot/wet phases, repeating themselves until often, the patient dies.

Of course no one knew the mosquito was to blame (despite theories stretching back to the sixth century BC) or much else about the condition, when the first explorers went into the South American jungle after the fabled Cinchona tree - said to bring sufferers out of their delirium. At the time the bark of the Cinchona, which contained Quinine (a powerful antipyretic, a substance which lowers the temperature of the body) "had to compete with such well-known and well-tried remedies as viper's broth, crab's eyes and murderer's skulls".

The early adventurers went through hell on their quests. One of the now-famed botanists sent to South America was Richard Spruce. He was struck down with malaria when "on the journey to the Amazon his Indian guides hatched a plot to steal his money and murder him, reasoning that no one would be surprised to hear that a man as ill as Spruce had died. Fortunately Spruce overheard their conversation and foiled the plot by lying awake all night in his canoe with one arm around his money chest and a double-barrelled shotgun propped on his knee". Leprosy, treacherous natives, cocaine addiction, rapids and whirlpools, swirling rivers, sheer drops and impenetrable forest all had to be fought to get to Cinchona.

These Indiana Jones, Heart of Darkness stories are arguably the best parts of the book, along with a well-sketched run-down of the political chaos at the time. The French, Spanish and English were all squabbling over South America, and even if the explorers managed to get their hands on the raw materials they had no guarantee they could get it out of the country. Smuggling, bartering and border hopping became as much a skill as botany.

The author also shows us how malaria changed history, not least in the conquest of the continent. When the English assailed Cartagena from the sea during the war of Jenkin's Ear in 1741, most of the men died on their ships before drawing their cutlasses. Malaria and Yellow Fever devastated the fleet.

"According to Smollett, the naval surgeon, the scene was horrendous. 'Nothing was heard but groans, lamentations and the language of despair invoking death to deliver [the men] from their miseries,' he recalled. When men died, there were too few hands on deck to prepare the corpses for a proper sea burial. The result was that soon the bay was strewn with shark-torn bodies floating on the surface."

Oliver Cromwell was also a victim. Although offered quinine, legend has it that because it had been successfully used in Rome, Cromwell refused to take the "Popish remedy". H M Stanley would never have found Dr Livingstone unless Livingstone had been devoted to quinine as a curative and a prophylactic. Recently, when the British government sent paratroopers into Sierra Leone, 16 soldiers took ill and one committed suicide rather than endure the dizziness, sleeplessness and depression of new anti-malarial drugs.

Eventually Cinchona was shipped from South America and was harvested by the Dutch in Java and the British in India, becoming increasingly refined until last century when it began to be overtaken by synthetic treatments. However the parasite is now evolving and developing resistance to new drugs, even the "magic bullet" choloroquine. Scientists were astonished when troops discovered their drugs were useless during the Vietnam war. It's a constant race against time for pharmacologists to outsmart malaria.

This is an enjoyable book, even for a layman. It's made a still-mysterious parasite accessible and reminded us just how dangerous it still is. Academics may not learn much new, but they'll have a great ride.