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The history of the malaria disease runs back to about fifty thousand years, the first recorded in 2700 B.C in China. This endemic disease is said to have contributed much in the decline of the Roman Empire because it was so much spread in the conglomerate causing poverty and death. So this sickness was also called as Roman fever. The term malaria was derived from the Italian term mala aria which means “bad air”. As the malady was closely linked with marshlands and swamps, it was also known as marsh fever.
Malaria is induced by a eukaryotic protist of the genus Plasmodium. It is a very old human parasite said to be mutated into its present form in chimpanzees. Malaria is spread from person to person by mosquitoes, which itself is a parasite that lives on the blood of mammals. Not all mosquitoes act as secondary host to the malarial parasite. The female mosquitoes of the Anopheles genus are the culprit that spreads malaria when it bites an infected patient, carries the plasmodium parasite in its saliva and transmits to the blood stream of the next person it bites.
Even when medical science has much advanced in this new century, still around 250 million cases of malaria are reported every year, causing death of between one and three million people, most of them being small children in sub-tropical region of Africa. Tropical and sub-tropical Asians are also victims. As the infection is spread fast in unhygienic conditions with standing water being the ground of mosquito reproduction, malaria is often associated with poverty and it surely also causes poverty, being a major hindrance to economic development.
The best way to prevent the disease is to forbid the spread of mosquitoes and prevent mosquito bites, Immunity to the disease should be acquired naturally. As such, there are no effective vaccines for malaria.
