Introduction

The term “malaria”, meaning “bad air” (mal‘aria) in Italian was first used by Lancisi in 1717, who linked the recurrent fevers to the closeness of marshy and notoriously foul-smelling areas. In the fifth century bc, Hippocrates reported clinical details of malaria. In 1880, Laveran a French Army medical doctor, in Algeria, described the malaria parasite in humans and won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1907. Golgi identified and described the Plasmodium vivax and malariae in 1886 in Italy, while Cilli and Marchiafawa fully described the life cycle of P. falciparum in 1889. In 1897 Ronald Ross identified malaria oocysts in the gut wall of a female anopheline mosquito. This discovery clearly linked the parasite to the vector, and the theory of malaria transmission to humans by Anopheles species was accepted in 1898, resulting in a Nobel Prize in 1902 (Gilles and Warrel 1993).