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Malaria
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Malaria parasites have been with is since the beginning of time. In Africa, fossils of mosquitoes up to 30 million years old show that the vector for malaria was present. In the fifth century B.C. Hippocrates described certain aspects of an illness now known to be characteristics of malaria. In the seventh century, the Italians named the disease mal' aria, meaning bad air, because of its association with ill smelling vapors from the swamps near Rome. It was ... around this time that the bark from the cinchona tree was used to treat the intermittent fevers associated with this illness. However, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that quinine was identified as the active alkaloid.
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Malaria is an infectious disease caused by a parasite, Plasmodium, which infects red blood cells. Malaria is characterized by cycles of chills, fever, pain and sweating. Historical records suggest malaria has infected humans since the beginning of mankind. The name "mal 'aria" (meaning "bad air" in Italian) was first used in English in 1740 by H. Walpole when describing the disease. The term was shortened to "malaria" in the 20th century. C. Laveran in 1880 was the first to identify the parasites in human blood.
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Malaria has serious economic impacts in Africa, slowing economic growth and development and perpetuating the vicious cycle of poverty. Malaria is truly a disease of poverty— afflicting primarily the poor who tend to live in malaria-prone rural areas in poorly-constructed dwellings that offer few, if any, barriers against mosquitoes.
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Founded in 2006 by leading non-governmental institutions, Malaria No More (http://www.malarianomore.org/) galvanizes individuals, organizations, and corporations in the private sector to provide life-saving bed nets and other critical interventions to families in need. Together these investments will significantly reduce malaria infections and make malaria-related deaths a thing of the past. Malaria No More works in partnership with the American Red Cross; the Global Business Coalition; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; Millennium Promise; Population Services International; the President's Malaria Initiative; UNICEF; United Nations Foundation; United Way of America; and others.
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Malaria currently kills between one and two million people annually; the majority of its victims are young children and pregnant women. Along with AIDS and tuberculosis (TB), malaria is one of the world's worst communicable diseases, with an estimated 500 million new cases each year. Although antimalarial drugs have saved hundreds of millions of lives in the past, they have a limited useful life, as do other drugs for infectious diseases, and will eventually need replacing. In fact, drug resistance to older antimalarial drugs is now so prevalent that the public health systems in disease-endemic countries that rely on these drugs have very few effective or affordable options. With better scientific knowledge, it is increasingly possible to develop drugs with longer, more useful lives for treating malaria, and to make a significant health and economic impact on the people and communities affected by this disease.
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Malaria transmission begins when a female mosquito bites a human already infected with the malaria parasite. The mosquito ingests blood containing immature male and female gametes (sex cells) of the malaria parasite. Inside the mosquito’s stomach, the gametes quickly mature. A male gamete fuses with a female gamete to produce a cell known as a zygote. The zygote enters the wall of the mosquito’s gut and develops into an oocyst. The oocyst multiplies to produce thousands of cells known as sporozoites.
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Malaria