59 Fun Facts About Malaria

Which Anopheles mosquitoes pass malaria parasites on to people?

Only the females bite, because they need blood to nourish their eggs; males live on plant nectar, so they never carry the parasite from one person to the next.

The word malaria comes from Italian words meaning what?

Bad air, or mala aria, got the blame because the fevers clustered around marshes; the mosquitoes that bred there were shown to be the real carriers only in the 1890s.

Which US health agency grew out of a wartime programme to control malaria around Southern military bases?

The CDC opened in 1946 as the Communicable Disease Center, taking over from Malaria Control in War Areas, and it sits in Atlanta because malaria was then still common across the South.

DNA tests published in 2010 found malaria parasites in the mummy of which Egyptian pharaoh?

Tutankhamun carried DNA from the deadliest malaria parasite, and the researchers suggested that an infection on top of a broken leg may have killed the boy king at 19.

Plasmodium knowlesi, a malaria parasite that spills over to people in Southeast Asia, normally infects which animals?

Macaques are its natural hosts, and people who farm, hunt or log near the monkeys' forests are bitten by the same mosquitoes, making it a significant cause of malaria in Malaysian Borneo.

Symptoms of malaria usually begin how long after the infective bite?

10 to 15 days go by because the parasites first multiply in the liver without causing any symptoms; the fevers begin only once they break out into the blood.

Which organ commonly becomes enlarged during a malaria infection?

The spleen swells because it filters infected red blood cells out of the circulation, which makes an enlarged spleen one of the classic signs doctors feel for.

What is the mobile form of the malaria parasite that a mosquito injects into a new host called?

Sporozoites are injected with the mosquito's saliva and head for the liver, where they multiply before a different form of the parasite spills out into the blood.

What is the dormant liver stage called that lets some malaria parasites reactivate months after the first illness?

Hypnozoites survive the drugs that clear the blood, which is why P. vivax and P. ovale patients also need primaquine to stop the fevers coming back.

In 1809 'Walcheren fever', thought to be malaria mixed with other diseases, wrecked a British expedition against which ruler?

Napoleon Bonaparte's garrisons barely had to fight: about a hundred British soldiers died in combat but roughly 4,000 of the fever, and the army gave up the swampy Dutch island within months.

Blackwater fever, a complication of severe malaria, takes its name from the dark colour of what?

The urine turns dark red or black as haemoglobin from burst red blood cells spills into it, and the condition can go on to kidney failure.

Roughly how many people caught malaria worldwide in 2024?

About 300 million: the WHO counted 282 million cases in 80 countries, roughly nine million more than the year before, and warned that drug resistance and funding cuts threaten two decades of gains.

Which African country had about a quarter of the world's malaria cases in 2024?

Nigeria had about 24% of the world's cases and 30% of the malaria deaths in 2024; with Africa's largest population, nearly all of it at risk, it carries more of the burden than any other country.

Which inherited condition gives its carriers partial protection against malaria?

Sickle cell trait means carrying one copy of the gene: it protects against malaria, which is why the gene stays common in malarial regions even though two copies cause sickle cell anaemia.

Vivax malaria is rare in much of Africa because most people there lack which blood-group marker?

Duffy is the protein P. vivax uses as its doorway into red blood cells, so people without it are largely protected, though recent studies have found the parasite infecting some of them.

Alphonse Laveran won the 1907 Nobel Prize for showing that malaria and other diseases are caused by which organisms?

Protozoa were what Laveran saw moving inside soldiers' red blood cells in Algeria in 1880; his first reports were met with much scepticism before other scientists confirmed them.

In which Indian city did Ronald Ross show in 1898, using birds, that mosquito bites transmit malaria?

Calcutta is where Ross, unable to go on working with human patients, infected sparrows through mosquito bites and tracked the parasite to the insects' salivary glands.

Besides medicine, what else did Nobel laureate Ronald Ross do?

Ross wrote poems, novels and songs, having wanted to be a writer rather than a doctor, and he even marked his 1897 mosquito discovery with a poem.

The Allies lost most of the world's quinine supply in 1942 when Japan seized the plantations of which island?

Java's Dutch plantations were producing most of the world's supply, so its capture cut Allied armies off from their main malaria drug just as they began fighting in the Pacific.

Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay argued in 1881 that mosquitoes spread which disease, a theory confirmed two decades later?

Yellow fever was his target: fellow doctors in Havana refused to accept his mosquito experiments until a US Army board proved the theory there in 1900.

The first effective malaria treatment came from the bark of which tree?

Cinchona bark from the Andes holds quinine; Jesuit missionaries learned of the fever cure in Peru and carried it to Europe in the 1600s, where it was long known as Jesuit's bark.

In the 1670s Robert Talbor cured which English king's fever with a secret remedy that was really Jesuit's bark?

Charles II made Talbor a royal physician and a knight, then lent him to France, where he cured the dauphin and Louis XIV bought the secret of the remedy.

Which insect repellent was developed for the US Army in the 1940s after its troops' experience of jungle warfare?

DEET entered military use in 1946 and went on public sale in 1957; it does not kill mosquitoes but is thought to scramble the sense of smell they use to find us.

Which decades-old malaria drug made headlines in 2020 when it was promoted, then found ineffective, as a COVID-19 treatment?

Hydroxychloroquine, an old antimalarial also used for lupus, was tested on COVID-19 patients around the world until large trials showed it did not cut deaths, and the WHO halted its trial arm in July 2020.

British officers in which country are credited with inventing the gin and tonic?

India is where, by tradition, British officials tamed their bitter daily quinine with soda and sugar, then stirred in the gin they were already issued.

Chloroquine was first made in 1934, under the name resochin, at which German company's laboratories?

Bayer's chemist Hans Andersag made it in 1934, but the firm judged it too toxic and set it aside for a decade, until wartime tests in America showed the verdict was wrong.

Where did chloroquine-resistant P. falciparum first appear in the 1950s?

Southeast Asia and South America saw it first, on the Thai-Cambodian border and in Colombia; resistant parasites did not reach Africa until the late 1970s, then swept the continent.

Which herb, used in Chinese medicine for some 2,000 years, is the source of the malaria drug artemisinin?

Sweet wormwood, or qinghao, was an old fever remedy; Tu Youyou's team screened hundreds of herbal recipes before its extract wiped out the parasites in mice in 1971.

Tu Youyou's herbal malaria extract only worked reliably once she stopped doing what to it?

Heating it was destroying the active compound: a 4th-century handbook by Ge Hong said only to soak the herb and wring out the juice, so Tu switched to a low-temperature extraction.

Project 523, the secret Chinese programme that found artemisinin, began in 1967 after a plea for help from which ally?

North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh asked China for help as drug-resistant malaria cut down his troops; the programme took its name from its launch date, 23 May 1967.

Tu Youyou first tested her malaria extract's safety on whom?

Herself and colleagues: Tu and two team members took the extract in hospital for a week in July 1972, felt no ill effects, and only then began the first trial on malaria patients.

Julius Wagner-Jauregg won the 1927 Nobel Prize for using deliberate malaria infections to treat the late stage of which disease?

Syphilis that had reached the brain was incurable, but doctors had noticed that high fevers sometimes helped, so he set them off on purpose with a comparatively mild form of malaria.

Which dictator's regime finally drained the malaria-ridden Pontine Marshes in the 1930s?

Benito Mussolini's engineers finished a drainage scheme that emperors and popes had begun and abandoned, then settled farmers from northern Italy around new towns such as Littoria, now Latina.

What was the first pesticide used for indoor residual spraying against malaria?

DDT worked so well that farms began using it by the ton; resistant mosquitoes appeared within years, and after Silent Spring rich countries banned its agricultural use in the 1970s.

Which toxic arsenic compound was once spread on standing water to kill mosquito larvae?

Paris Green, an emerald paint pigment laced with arsenic, was dusted over ponds and ditches; in 1939-40 it helped drive an invading African malaria mosquito out of north-east Brazil.

Which island nation cut malaria to under 20 cases in 1963, stopped spraying, and suffered half a million by 1969?

Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, wound down its house spraying once the disease seemed beaten; malaria roared back, and when spraying resumed the mosquitoes had become resistant to the insecticide.

The Global Fund fights AIDS, malaria and which other disease?

Tuberculosis is the third; the Fund pools donor money but runs no programmes itself, leaving countries to design and carry out their own, so it keeps no staff outside its Geneva office.

RTS,S, the first malaria vaccine approved for use, is sold under which brand name?

Mosquirix took GSK some 30 years to develop; a pilot in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi from 2019 cut deadly severe malaria by about 30%, and the WHO recommended it for wider use in 2021.

R21/Matrix-M, the second malaria vaccine backed by the WHO, was developed by scientists at which university?

Oxford's Jenner Institute teamed up with the Serum Institute, a vaccine maker that can produce more than 100 million doses a year, enough to ease the shortage that held back the first malaria vaccine.

The first promising malaria vaccine studies, in 1967, protected mice by injecting them with what?

Radiation-weakened sporozoites could no longer cause disease but still primed the mice to fight off live parasites, and by 1973 the same approach was protecting human volunteers.

A 2025 analysis credited which tool with most of the malaria cases prevented in Africa since 2000?

Insecticide-treated nets prevented about 1.1 billion of the roughly 1.6 billion cases averted by malaria control from 2000 to 2024, though the analysts warned that coverage has stalled since 2016.

Which everyday English word comes from the ancient Greek for a couch hung with mosquito curtains?

Canopy goes back to konopeion, a bed with mosquito netting, from konops, the Greek for a mosquito or gnat; the hangings outlived the insects and gave the word its modern meaning.

The wartime malaria pill Atabrine turned Allied soldiers' skin which colour?

Yellow skin was the price of Atabrine, a synthetic substitute that America mass-produced for its troops once the war cut off supplies of natural quinine.

William Gorgas's war on mosquitoes from 1904 cleared the way for which engineering project?

The Panama Canal had already defeated the French in the 1880s, when fevers killed thousands of their workers; Gorgas had the ponds and swamps where mosquitoes bred drained before the Americans dug in earnest.

Malaria was once so rife in Italy's capital that the disease was known by what nickname?

Roman fever returned every summer as mosquitoes bred in the marshes around the city; it turned back invading armies more than once and may have hastened the empire's decline.

Which ancient Greek physician described the periodic fevers of malaria as tertian, quartan and quotidian?

Hippocrates sorted the fevers by how often they came back, every day, every other day or every third day, a rhythm later traced to parasites bursting out of red blood cells in step.

A 2010 study of droppings collected in the wild traced the deadliest malaria parasite back to which animals?

Gorillas living wild in central Africa carry parasites nearly identical to P. falciparum, which suggests the human strain began with a single jump from a gorilla, carried across by a mosquito.

Malaria probably reached the Americas after 1492 with European colonists and the people they enslaved from which region?

West Africa is where the deadliest strain most likely came from: no surviving Mesoamerican medical record describes the disease, and it took hold first in the Caribbean and Central America.

With no breathing tube, unlike other mosquito larvae, how do Anopheles larvae rest at the water's surface?

Lying flat beneath it is the only way they can reach the air, and that horizontal pose lets collectors tell malaria mosquitoes' larvae from others, which hang down from a siphon.

Avian malaria, carried by an introduced mosquito, has helped wipe out native forest birds on which Pacific islands?

Hawaii's honeycreepers evolved without the parasite or its mosquito, both brought in by people, and the survivors now cling to cool mountain forests where transmission is rare.

Fevers blamed on malaria left about half the British army unfit to fight at which siege of the American Revolution?

Yorktown lies in Virginia's tidewater marshes, and by the 1781 surrender Cornwallis reckoned half his men were too ill to fight, while the besieging Americans, thought to be partly immune, were far less affected.

Malaria is usually confirmed by microscopy of blood films or by what kind of rapid test?

Antigen-based tests pick up proteins made by the parasite itself in a finger-prick of blood and give a result within half an hour, so malaria can be diagnosed in villages with no laboratory.

Which lab technique, a household name since COVID-19, is the most sensitive test for malaria but too costly for routine use?

PCR testing copies the parasite's DNA until even a handful of parasites show up and can name the species, but it needs lab equipment, so clinics where malaria is common rely on microscopes and rapid tests.

Who led the US Army board in Cuba that proved Carlos Finlay's mosquito theory in 1900?

Walter Reed's board had infected mosquitoes bite human volunteers, and two of its own members caught the disease: James Carroll fell ill and recovered, but Jesse Lazear died.

Which group suffered about three-quarters of Africa's 2024 malaria deaths?

Children under five have not yet built the partial immunity that older people in malaria zones gain from repeated infections, which is why the disease kills the very young most.

Which brand-name pill, combining atovaquone and proguanil, do many travellers choose for short tropical trips?

Malarone suits short trips because it is taken for only seven days after leaving a malaria zone, where doxycycline and mefloquine must be continued for four weeks.

Which English ruler is said to have refused the Jesuits' malaria remedy on religious grounds before dying in 1658?

Oliver Cromwell was a fierce Puritan and the cure was nicknamed Jesuits' powder; in one telling he would not touch it, in another his doctors tried it in too small a dose.

Which country's malaria cases multiplied after record 2022 monsoon floods that affected 33 million of its people?

Pakistan's retreating floodwater left pools of standing water where mosquitoes bred, and its malaria cases climbed from about half a million in 2021 to several million a year.

Which Portuguese explorer is thought to have died of malaria in 1524, months after sailing east as viceroy?

Vasco da Gama had opened the sea route around Africa to Asia a quarter-century earlier; sent back to reform Portugal's trading posts, he fell ill and died at Cochin on Christmas Eve.