The existence of malaria as an enemy
of human kind certainly predates written history for thousands of year. Malaria
has been a deadly scourge, and it remains one today.
From American president john
Adam who nearly succumbed to
malaria in Amsterdam while on a
diplomatic mission, back down the time line to the early Chinese, Greeks and Romans, malaria has
not spared its victims rich or
poor.
It wasn’t until
19th century that the
information about the true causes of malaria became known. Yet despite the knowledge, malaria
still ravages sub –Sahara Africa, south east, Asia and Latin America, taking
as its victims mainly young children and pregnant women . malaria
parasite was discovered by Charles Louis
Alphonse laveran on 20 October 1880
while examining blood from a
solider suffering from malaria. Dr
Laveran saw crescent shaped bodies that
were nearly transparent except for one small dot of pigment
after examining blood from 192
other malaria patients to be
identified the same crescent in 148 of
the sample. Later he recognized the four
distinct forms in human blood that would prove to be the malaria parasite in different stages of its life cycle . Laveran received the noble prize in 1907
for the discovery of the single
–celled protozoa that causes malaria
On
20 august 1897, Ronald a British officer in the India medicine service was the first to demonstrate that malaria parasites could be transmitted from infected
patients to mosquitoes. He also demonstrated in his investigations of
bird malaria that mosquitoes could
transmit malaria parasites from bird to bird. Ross was awarded
the Nobel prize for his discovery in
1902.
In
1898 -1899 a group of Italian
scientist (G. Crrassi, A Bignami, G- Bastianelli, A. Dionisi, A. Cell) confirmed that human
malaria parasites pass through the same developmental stages in the mosquito as the bird parasites
observed by Ross.
1n
1948, the malaria parasite
was discovered in the human tissue,
malaria parasites was detected in the
liver at rhesus monkeys infected with
the primate species . They found similar
stages in the livers of humans infected with p vivax and later
confirmed the same for p. falciparum. This public
health work saved the lines of
thousands of workers and developed the
method used in future public
health campaign against this disease.
The first effective treatment of
malaria came from the bark at cinchona tree, which contain quinine. This tree
grows on the slopes at the andes mainly in peru. A tincture made of this
natural product was used by the inhabitants of peru to control malaria and
the jesuist introduced this practice to Europe during the 1840s
where it was rapidly accepted. It
was not useful in 1820 that the active ingredient quinine was extracted from the bark of cinchona
tree, and isolated by the French chemists pierre Joseph pelletetier and Joseph bienaime caventon.
In
the early twentieth century, before
antibodies, patients with syphilis were
intentionally infected with
malaria to create a fever following the work of
Julius Wanger Jaurogy by accurately controlling the fever with quinine, the effects of both syphilis and malaria could be
minimized.
Although the blood stage and mosquito stages of the
malaria life cycle were identified in the
19th and early 20th centuries, it was not until
1980s that the latent form of the parasite was observed . the
discovery of this latent form of the parasitic
finally explained why people could
appear to be cured of malarial but still relapse years
after the parasite had disappeared
from their blood stream.