27 April,2011 02:36 PM IST | | The Trip Team
April 25 is celebrated as malaria awareness day. 10 facts on the deadly disease
1 Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease, caused by the parasite eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium. It is transmitted from one human to another by the bite of infected Anopheles mosquito.
2u00a0Malaria is fatal. According to the latest WHO report, there are more than 225 million cases of malaria, killing around 781,000 people, accounting for 2.23% of deaths worldwide.
3u00a0Malaria is curable. Treatment varies depending on the severity of the disease.
4 Eleven pm to five am is the time you are most vulnerable to malaria. This is when the mosquito that transmits this potentially fatal disease usually bites.
5u00a0Malaria symptoms include fever, shivering, joint pains, vomitting and anaemia. There is a cyclical occurrence of severe cold, followed by high fever and sweating that lasts up to several hours. Symptoms typically appear nine to 14 days after the infectious mosquito bite.
6u00a0Children and pregnant women are most vulnerable to malaria, because of their weakened or underdeveloped immune systems.
7u00a0Malaria was known as 'Roman fever'. It may even have contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire, given how pervasive it was in Rome.
8u00a01880 was an important year in the study of malaria. It was when Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a French army doctor working in a military hospital in Algeria, observed parasites inside the red blood cells of people suffering from the disease.
9u00a0The bark of the cinchona tree provided the first effective treatment for malaria. This is because the bark contains quinine. Jesuits introduced the treatment in Europe in the 1640s, but it was not until 1820 that quinine was extracted from the bark, isolated, and then named by the French chemists Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaim ufffd Caventou.
10 Ninety-one percent of malaria-related deaths occur in Africa, the majority of whom are children under 5 years of age.
