Ronald Ross was a British physician born in 1857 in Almora, India. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his discovery of the life cycle of the malarial parasite.
Deadly fevers were recorded as early as 2000 BC. These fevers, possibly due to malaria, caused a great number of deaths worldwide. Even today malaria causes around 3 million deaths every year and affects 40 per cent of the world’s population.
Till a little more than a century ago it was thought that these fevers were caused by something in the air, especially the air of swamps and in marshy areas. The word malaria itself means ‘bad air’ in Italian.
It was Sir Ronald Ross who discovered that malaria was not caused by bad air but by the bite of the female Anopheles mosquito. He traced the life history of the plasmodium parasite, and found that it began its life in the stomach of a mosquito. Here it bred rapidly and passed into the blood of a healthy person when the insect bit him.
Once mosquitoes were identified as the cause of malaria, worldwide efforts were made to destroy them and antimalarial drugs were developed. With this, the incidence of malaria dropped significantly all around the world.
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