Malaria is a disease. Mosquitoes spread malaria.
When the mosquito bites you, it sprays saliva over the wound to stop it from bleeding.
That is how the Plasmodeum parasite gets into the human body and spreads through the body of the victim.
The Plasmodeum parasite causes the life threatening disease malaria.
Did you know that the Plasmodeum parasites are so small that 50 000 of them could fit in the full stop at the end of this sentence?
One hundred and four nations are in danger because their mosquitoes carry malaria, mainly in poor countries in Africa and South America.
Malaria kills at least one million people a year and 700 000 of these are children! Malaria is said to have killed more people in world war two than bullet or bombs!
How old is malaria?
Malaria is not a new disease. Malaria has been around for so long it has killed anything and anyone from Herrerasaurus in the Triassic period to Alexander the Great is 400 BC, to over one million people is 2006.
Malaria is a prehistoric parasite that existed in the world before flues and hundreds and millions of other diseases.
But although malaria kills over one million per year, 650 million people get sick from malaria and survive from it.
So about only 0,3 percent die from the malaria but the rest are scarred for life!
Does malaria live in other animals?
Malaria is not only a disease that humans get. Birds, mammals and reptiles can all catch their own form of malaria.
Nearly everything that gets bitten by mosquitoes (that is, anything that doesn’t live in the ocean) gets some form of malaria.
So why is malaria only well known to kill humans? Because only a small number of animals die every year compared to humans and why?
Firstly, because the human population is so much higher than other animals that malaria has more hosts to inhabit (live in).
Secondly, more animals die from global warming, forest destruction and other man-caused destruction phenomena that malaria in animals is not very well publicised.
Adaptions of Malaria
Malaria has adapted to a number of things, but some are more critical, like some types of malaria have adapted to too many of the available cures.
Malaria has also adapted not to kill the mosquito so that the mosquito can carry the disease from the first host to the second host.
If the mosquito was killed, the parasite might not be passed on in time.
Another one of malarias main adaptations is that it goes so fast to the liver that the immune system cannot detect it before it is safe in the liver. — Arlo’s Malaria Project