Abstract:
The word malaria is an amalgamation of medieval Italian words, mal’aria; mal meaning bad and aria
meaning air. The disease was thought to be caused by foul air associated with mushy lands and lowlying
swamps, hence the name. In 1880, a French army surgeon Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran
noticed a parasite in blood of individuals suffering from malaria. Laveran was awarded the Nobel prize
in 1907 for his discovery. Camillo Golgi described two forms of the disease; one showing tertian
periodicity (fever every other day) and the other with quartan periodicity (fever every third day). The
discovery that malaria parasites are transmitted by mosquitoes was made by Ronald Ross, a British
officer in the Indian medical services and received the Nobel prize in 1902 his discovery. The names
Plasmodium malariae and Plasmodium vivax were given by Italian physician and zoologist Giovanni
Battista Grassi and Raimondo Filetti in 1890, respectively. Giovanni Batista Grassi was also the first
one to establish the complete life cycle of Plasmodium falciparum and to discover that malaria
transmission occurs via female anopheline mosquitoes. An American physician William H. Welch
named the more malignant malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum. Plasmodium ovale was named by
John William Watson Stephens who observed this parasite species in blood of an East African patient
whose erythrocytes were oval and had fimbriated edges. He named the species ovale in recognition of
oval shape of the infected RBCs. Plasmodium knowlesi, the species that causes malaria in long-tailed and
pig-tailed macaques has been recently found to cause malaria in humans through zoonotic transfer
(Arrow et. al., 2004; Cox 2010).
