QUESTION

When was malaria first detected?

ANSWER

Humans have known about malaria as a disease for thousands of years. The earliest written record of malaria is from ancient China, 2700 BCE. The ancient Romans and Greeks also described the symptoms of malaria, though none of these ancient people knew the true cause or had identified specifically how it was transmitted. This was first achieved in the 19th century, first in 1880 by Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, who observed the parasites that cause malaria in the blood of a patient. A few years later, in 1897/1898, Ronald Ross discovered that the parasites were transmitted between hosts via mosquitoes, thus laying the foundations for future decades of malaria control efforts.