Malarial parasite
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Of all the infectious diseases: malaria (from the Italian mal aria, meaning 'bad air' ) has affected the most number of people. But the true cause of this disease - which is credited with bringing down the Roman Empire - was not pinpointed until the nineteenth century. The first finding was Alphonse Laveran's 1880 discovery of the malaris parasite - the Plasmodium, a protozoan. In 1894, Patrick Manson suggested that the infection might be transmitted by mosquitoes. And in 1897 Ronald Ross a British medical officer working in India, finally located in the stomach wall of an Anopheles mosquito; the eggs that are intermediate state of the plasmodium life cycle. He devoted another year of to collecting, feeding mosquito's and dissecting the salivary gland. Here it waits to be injected into its human host when a female mosquito takes her blood meal.
Unsympathetic employers hampered Ross's work in India. Transferred to a region where human malaria was scarce, he undertook ground-breaking research on the malarial parasite of birds. In Italy, Battista Grassi stole Ross's thunder by working out the full sequence of transmission in human malaria. An ugly priority dispute followed, and, amid some controversy, Ross received the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in proving the lifecycle of malaria. He is also responsible for the creation of the intellectual framework of establishing tropical medicine as a distinct speciality, prompting the search for the parasite-vector pairing often responsible for diseases rife in hot climates.
Ross was one of the many who developed measure to control malaris through the eradication of mosquitoes. The introduction of the insecticide DDT during the Second World War was a great boon, and in 1955 the World Health Organization judged the conquest of malaria an attainable goal. But the campaign was thwarted. Mosquitoes quickly became resistant to DDT and the insecticide proved to be harmful to the environment.
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