What is Malaria?

The reason why I chose to write about malaria is because I have been a victim of the disease for 3 different times when I used to live in Kenya. Malaria has been considered as one of the deadliest diseases that would kill many who do not have its knowledge. But what is malaria and how is it transmitted? These are some of the questions plus many others that this blog will be explaining in detail.
To start off the main question that many people ask is 'what is malaria?' the reason being not many people here in America have fallen sick of the disease. To them it is still a mysterious disease that they hear people in Africa get sick and die and today’s blog will define the disease and its transmission. The history of malaria dates back to the  18^th century when a surgeon named Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran discovered some malaria parasites in the blood of a sick patient when he was stationed in Algeria. At around 1890 two Italian investigators by the name Giovanni Batista Grassi and Raimondo Filetti came up with the names Plasmodium vivax and P. malariae that caused the disease which was characterized by fever and chills. After 7 years of the discovery a British officer by the name Ronald Ross made the discovery that mosquitos would actually carry the parasites from an infected person and transmit it to the birds (CDC 2012) All this led to the discovery of malaria which means ‘bad air’ in Italian and was one of the diseases that scared people in the 18^th and 19^th century.
According to the national geographic (2015), the parasite gets to a human when an infected anopheles female mosquito bites any exposed area of the skin. During this process as the mosquito bites and sucks blood it transmits its saliva in the blood stream lf the person who is then infected with the parasites. This disease is often considered disease of the poor and the underprivileged but it usually kills many people each year. In the United States they kept fighting the disease by spraying houses and residences which highly reduced the infection rate. Finally in the year 1951 the United States declared that the disease had been fully eradicated (CDC 2012).

http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/006/cache/mosquito_634_600x450.jpg

The History of Malaria, an Ancient Disease. (n.d.). Retrieved April 9, 2015, from http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/
 Malaria. (n.d.). Retrieved April 9, 2015, from http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/malaria/finkel-text/1