Malaria is caused by protozoan parasites called Plasmodia, belonging to the parasitic phylum Apicomplexa. More than 200 species of the genus Plasmodium (=plasma + eidos, form) have been identified that are parasitic to reptiles, birds, and mammals.[1] Four Plasmodium species have been well known to cause human malaria, namely, P.…
Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a calm, reserved, unemotional French Military Surgeon, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1907 for his discovery of the malaria parasite and other significant contribution to parasitology. Laveran, a stiff, aloof, quiet man, as slow and methodical in his speech as in his…
Man and Malaria seem to have evolved together. It is believed that most, if not all, of today’s populations of human malaria may have had their origin in West Africa (P. falciparum) and West and Central Africa (P. vivax) on the basis of the presence of homozygous alleles for hemoglobin…
