Lately, many Venezuelans have taken matters into their own hands.

Five hours away in the newly infected town of El Dique, residents were collecting 100 bolívars from each household to hire a fumigator to come spray their homes.

In the mine, where malaria tests are sometimes unavailable, miners said they had developed an exam of their own: Drink two bottles of beer. If a sharp pain is felt afterward in the liver, where the parasites reside, then the patient has malaria, the test goes. Health officials said the measure was futile.

Still, Mr. Balocha, the former computer technician who works in the Albino Mine, lives by it. Miners call it an “artisanal test.”

He was sick once again, waiting for medicine at a chain-link fence on the edge of a clinic. He recalled the words of his uncle, who phoned him a year ago when Mr. Balocha found his salary as a computer technician to be worthless in the city of Valencia.

“There is money here,” said the uncle, who was mining then. “You have to know how to find it.”

Mr. Balocha started as a “palero,” a stone breaker, getting the smallest cut of the take. But it was still more than what his salary bought in the city after inflation had whittled it away, he said.

He recalled the first time he got malaria, too, the “chills like you were lying down between two blocks of ice.”

“The first time you get malaria is the ugliest,” Mr. Balocha said. “You can’t control the tremors. You feel like you will die. You feel like you are a zombie.”