by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION
What is malaria and when was it diagnosed?
ANSWER
Malaria is a disease caused by a single-celled parasite of the genus Plasmodium. Five types of malaria infect humans: P. falciparum, P. ovale, P. vivax, P. malariae and P. knowlesi. It was first observed in the blood of a patient who had died of malaria in 1880 by Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a French physician working in Algeria.
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION
How was malaria discovered?
ANSWER
Malaria has long been known to human populations from across the world. In fact, the first mention of the symptoms of malaria comes from an ancient Chinese manuscript from 2700 BCE! However, the actual cause and mechanism of transmission of the disease was only discovered in the 19th century.
It was Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a French physician working in Algeria, who first observed the parasites that cause malaria in 1880, by looking at the blood of a patient that had recently died of malaria. However, at this point, it still wasn’t understood how malaria was transmitted. That was not discovered until 1897, when Ronald Ross, a British physician dedicated to curing malaria, observed malaria parasites in a mosquito that had been experimentally fed the blood of a patient infected with malaria. Working in India, Ross also later showed that mosquitoes could also transmit malaria to birds, if they had previously fed on the blood of birds which had malaria. In this way, he showed that mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles are responsible for transmitting malaria between hosts.
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
Which doctor first found that Anopheles mosquitoes transmitted malaria?
ANSWER:
The first person to show conclusively that malaria could be transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes was Ronald Ross (later knighted in 1911 for his services to medicine).
Working in the Presidency General Hospital in Calcutta (Sir Ronald was born in India and joined the Indian Medical Services in 1881 after studying medicine in London), he observed malaria parasites in the salivary glands of mosquitoes that had been fed on infected birds. This was in 1898, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1902 based on this discovery. A medical board in 1900 later confirmed his findings, and provided recommendations for the control of malaria, some of which were instrumental in limiting the impact of the disease on workers employed to construct the Panama Canal.
The parasite that causes malaria, of the genus Plasmodium, had been identified in 1880 by the French doctor Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, who had observed the parasites in the red blood cells of infected patients in Algeria.