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Ronald Ross proves mosquitoes transmit malaria

20 August 1897·Science, technology & invention·British India (Secunderabad)·
20 August 1897Date
Science, technology & inventionCategory
26Empires active
Date
20 August 1897
Category
Science, technology & invention
Region
British India (Secunderabad)
Era
Modern
Significance

On 20 August 1897, while working in Secunderabad in British India, the army surgeon Ronald Ross dissected an Anopheles mosquito that had fed days earlier on a malaria patient and found the malarial parasite developing within cells of the insect's stomach wall, demonstrating that mosquitoes carry the parasite.

Ross called the date 'Mosquito Day'. By July 1898, using bird malaria as a more tractable model, he traced the full cycle by which the parasite passes from an infected host through the mosquito to a new host via its bite, working in dialogue with the Italian malariologists who soon confirmed the same mechanism in human malaria. Establishing the mosquito as the vector of one of humanity's deadliest diseases opened the way to control malaria by attacking mosquitoes and their breeding sites rather than by addressing 'miasmatic' air, reshaping public health and colonial medicine across the tropics. Ross received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1902, the discovery standing as a milestone in tropical medicine and in the science of disease transmission.

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