Malaria is probably one of the oldest diseases known to humankind.

• Malaria was always part of the ups and downs of nations; of wars and of upheavals. Mentions of this disease can be found in the ancient Chinese, Indian and Egyptian manuscripts. The disease supposedly had its origins in the jungles of Africa, where it is still very much rampant.
• Charaka and Sushrutha, the two leading lights of Indian System of Medicine, ‘‘Ayurveda’, gave vivid descriptions of malaria and even associated it with the bites of the mosquitoes.
• In 1640, Huan del Vego first employed the tincture of the cinchona bark for treating malaria, although the aborigines of Peru and Ecuador had been using it even earlier for treating fevers.
• In 1696 Morton presented the first detailed description of the clinical picture of malaria and its treatment with cinchona.
• Lancisi (1717) linked malaria with poisonous vapours of swamps and thus originated the name malaria, meaning bad air.
• In 1816, Gize studied extraction of crystalline quinine from the cinchona bark and in 1820, Pelletier and Caventou extracted pure quinine alkaloids.
• In 1880, Laveran, a French physician working in Algeria, first identified the causative agent for human malaria. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1907.
• In 1885, Golgi identified P. vivax and P. malariae.
• Sakharov in 1889 and Marchiafava and Celli in 1890 identified P. falciparum.
• In 1891, Romanowsky described staining methods for identifying malarial parasites.
• In 1891, Ehrlich discovered the mild anti malarial activity of methylene blue.
• In 1894, Manson hypothesised that mosquitoes transmit malaria.
• On August 20th, 1897, Sir Ronald Ross, while working as a military physician in India, demonstrated the malarial oocysts in the gut tissue of female Anopheles mosquito, thus proving the fact that Anopheline mosquitoes were the vectors for malaria. That day is observed as Mosquito Day. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1902. (Ross never aspired to be a physician, he wanted to be a writer. His father forced him to join medicine!)
• In 1928, Schuleman, Schonhofer and Wingler synthesised Plasmoquine
• In 1930, Mietzsch, Mauss and Hecht obtained atebrine and Knunyants and Chelintsev synthesised acriquine.
• In 1939, Paul Muller discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT.
• In 1944, Curd, Davey and Rose synthesised proguanil for treating falciparum malaria.
• During World War II research into antimalarials was intensified. Chloroquine, one of the most important antimalarials, was synthesised and studied under the name of Resochin by the Germans as early as 1934.
• In 1948, Short, Garnham, Covell and Shute (England) identified tissue forms of P. vivax in the liver. Tissue stages of P. falciparum (Short et al., 1949), P. ovale (Garnham et al., 1954), and P. malariae (Bray, 1959) were also identified later on.
• In 1950 Elderfield of USA synthesised primaquine.
• In 1976 - 78, Lysenko et al formulated a theory on the polymorphism of P. vivax sporozoites, and by 1982, after 100 years of the discovery of the parasite, Bray and Garnham proposed that some sporozoites in the liver remain latent (hypnozoites), causing relapses later on.
• Mefloquine was discovered by the American researchers during the Vietnam war.
• In 1987, Dr. Manuel Elkin Patarroyo, a Colombian biochemist, developed the first synthetic vaccine against the Plasmodium falciparum parasite. Its efficacy is yet to be proved.

Dr. B.S.Kakkilaya's Malaria WebSite