60 Fun Facts About Malaria

Which sex of Anopheles mosquito transmits malaria?

Females need blood meals, and the bite injects parasites from the mosquito's saliva.

The word malaria comes from medieval Italian words meaning what?

It was also called ague, paludism and marsh fever, and appeared in English at least as early as 1768.

How many Plasmodium species cause malaria in humans?

P. ovale is now split into two species, curtisi and wallikeri.

P. falciparum accounts for roughly what share of identified human malaria infections?

The next most common species accounts for most of the rest and dominates outside Africa.

Which Plasmodium species is a macaque malaria that infects thousands of people a year?

It is the only ape or monkey malaria of real public-health importance in humans.

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

The parasites multiply silently in the liver first; all symptoms come from the red-blood-cell stage.

Each infected liver cell can end up harbouring up to how many parasites before it bursts?

After 5 to 25 days the cells break down and release merozoites into the blood.

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

Merozoites are the smaller form released from the liver to invade red blood cells.

Two of the species can hide in the liver as a dormant stage that reactivates months later. What is it called?

This is why those species cause true relapses even after the blood has been cleared.

Untreated cerebral malaria can kill within how long of the first symptoms?

Infected red cells block capillaries in the brain and damage the blood-brain barrier.

"Blackwater fever" in severe malaria describes what?

It often precedes kidney failure.

Roughly how many people caught malaria worldwide in 2024?

An estimated 610,000 of them died, the great majority in sub-Saharan Africa.

What share of malaria cases and deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa?

Nigeria, the DR Congo, Uganda, Ethiopia and Mozambique together account for more than half.

Which inherited blood condition gives carriers partial protection against malaria?

Infected red cells sickle and are removed from circulation before the parasite can complete its cycle.

The absence of which blood-group marker on red blood cells gives resistance to malaria?

Thalassaemia traits and G6PD deficiency are other protective genetic factors.

Who first observed malaria parasites inside red blood cells, in Algeria in 1880?

It was the first time a protist was identified as causing disease; he won the 1907 Nobel Prize.

In which city did Ronald Ross prove in 1897 that mosquitoes transmit malaria, working with birds?

He found the parasite in a mosquito's gut on 20 August 1897 and won the 1902 Nobel Prize.

How much did Ross pay his patient Husein Khan per blood-fed mosquito during his 1897 experiments?

He cultured 20 adult "brown" mosquitoes from larvae and dissected them after feeding.

Besides medicine, Ross was a polymath who did what?

He had wanted to be a writer and spent much of medical school composing music and plays.

Which Italian team proved in 1898 that infected mosquitoes transmit malaria to humans?

Grassi showed that only Anopheles mosquitoes could transmit human malaria.

Which Cuban doctor showed in 1881 that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever?

His and Ross's findings were confirmed by Walter Reed's board in 1900.

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

It grows on the Andean slopes, mainly in Peru, and the Jesuits brought the remedy to Europe around 1640.

Linnaeus named the quinine-bark tree genus in 1742 after a tale of which noblewoman's 1638 cure?

She was vicereine of Peru; Linnaeus used the Italian spelling and the tale is doubted today.

Which two French chemists isolated and named quinine in 1820?

Bark extracts had been used since at least 1632, and quinine ruled until the 1920s.

On a bar's soda gun, tonic water is marked with which letter, standing for quinine?

Tonic was first sold in 1858 as a way of delivering anti-malarial quinine.

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

They also added lime to fend off scurvy; American Civil War surgeons preferred quinine with whisky.

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

It was shelved for a decade as too toxic before replacing quinine in the 1940s.

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

Resistance had spread globally by the 1980s.

Artemisinin, discovered by Tu Youyou, is extracted from which plant?

Chinese herbalists had used the plant for 2,000 years.

Tu Youyou was guided by a 4th-century Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments by which author?

Its recipe used cold extraction, which turned out to be the key: hot water destroyed the active compound.

What was the secret 1967 Chinese military programme, launched at North Vietnam's request, that Tu Youyou worked on?

Ho Chi Minh's soldiers on the trail south were dying of chloroquine-resistant malaria.

Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in which year?

She was the first Chinese Nobel laureate in the category and the first female PRC citizen to win any Nobel.

Which psychiatrist won the 1927 Nobel Prize for infecting patients with malaria to treat syphilis?

The fever therapy was dangerous and is no longer used.

Malariotherapy for syphilis, used from 1917 to the 1940s, killed roughly what share of patients?

P. vivax was the species used, because its fevers were survivable enough to induce on purpose.

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

Its agricultural overuse bred resistant mosquitoes and led to bans in the 1970s.

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

Removing or poisoning breeding grounds controlled malaria in those countries.

The WHO's first Global Malaria Eradication Program ran from 1955 until it was suspended in what year?

It cleared malaria from North America, Europe and the Soviet Union but barely reached sub-Saharan Africa.

The Roll Back Malaria Partnership was launched in what year?

It failed to secure enough funding, and global malaria deaths peaked in 2004.

What is the brand name of RTS,S, the first approved vaccine against P. falciparum?

Pilot programmes began in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi in 2019, reaching three million children by 2023.

The second WHO-endorsed malaria vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, showed what efficacy in initial trials?

It reduced cases by 75% in seasonal-transmission areas and 68% where malaria spreads year-round.

The first promising vaccine studies in 1967 protected mice using what?

Natural immunity is partial and short-lived because each parasite stage wears different antigens.

What share of malaria cases averted in Africa from 2000 to 2024 did a 2025 analysis credit to bednets?

Net deliveries rose from 6 million a year in 2004 to nearly 190 million a decade later.

The English word "canopy" derives from the Greek conopeum, which was what?

The word comes from konops, Greek for mosquito, and the curtains were widely used in Egypt.

World Malaria Day is observed on which date?

It was established by the World Health Assembly in 2007, growing out of Africa Malaria Day.

Whose mosquito-control campaign from 1904 tamed malaria and yellow fever at the Panama Canal?

The French canal effort of the 1880s had been wrecked partly by disease.

Malaria in and around ancient Rome was so common the disease got what nickname?

It may have contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.

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

The Roman writer Columella linked the disease to insects from swamps.

Some evidence suggests P. falciparum originated in which animals?

The parasite's population only boomed about 10,000 years ago with farming and settlements.

How did malaria most likely reach the Americas?

The few surviving Mesoamerican medical records show no sign of the disease.

Anopheles mosquito larvae differ from other mosquito larvae in lacking what?

They breathe and feed lying horizontal to the water surface.

Which entomologist named the genus Anopheles in 1818?

He said the name meant "burdensome"; the Greek anopheles means "useless".

What milestone did the WHO European Region record in the year the SDGs were adopted?

It met the target of the Tashkent Declaration.

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

The rapid tests target parasite proteins such as HRP2, lactate dehydrogenase or aldolase and can be used where there is no lab.

Which stain is used on the blood films that remain the gold standard for diagnosing malaria?

A thick film lets the microscopist scan many cells quickly; a thin film shows individual parasites to identify the species.

Who headed the 1900 medical board that confirmed the findings of Finlay and Ross?

The confirmation paved the way for Gorgas's mosquito-control campaigns in Havana and Panama.

Roughly how many people died of malaria worldwide in 2024?

Children under five accounted for three-quarters of the deaths in Africa that year.

What is the brand name of the atovaquone/proguanil combination used for prevention?

Unlike mefloquine or doxycycline it needs to start only two days before travel and continue just seven days after.

How much were malaria's annual economic losses in Africa estimated at in 2005?

The toll comes from healthcare costs, lost work and damage to tourism, tying the disease tightly to poverty.

Pakistan's 2022 floods led to how large an increase in malaria cases within two years?

Climate-linked flooding and El Niño rains are repeatedly associated with surges in cases.

Household access to insecticide-treated nets in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 7% in 2005 to roughly what by 2015?

Global malaria funding had jumped from about $960 million to $2.5 billion over the same decade.