Malaria is a mosquito borne illness caused by the female anopheles mosquito. Each year 350-500 million cases of malaria occur worldwide, and over one million people die, most of them young children in Africa south of the Sahara (CDC).
The British Medical Journal has uploaded a 10 minute YouTube video (Death by Mosquito) on the origins of malaria as we understand it now. Prior to the paper published in the BMJ in 1900, malaria was thought to be an airborne infection (mal = foul).
In 1900 Patrick Manson wrote a seminal paper in the BMJ Experimental Proof of the Mosquitomalaria Theory he worked closely with Ronald Ross, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for medicine for his work on malaria.
