Who discovered malaria?
History of malaria
Britain's Sir Ronald Ross, an army surgeon working in Secunderabad India, proved in 1897 that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes, an event now commemorated via World Mosquito Day.[72] He was able to find pigmented malaria parasites in a mosquito that he artificially fed on a malaria patient who had crescents in his blood. He continued his research into malaria by showing that certain mosquito species (Culex fatigans) transmit malaria to sparrows and he isolated malaria parasites from the salivary glands of mosquitoes that had fed on infected birds.[73] He reported this to the British Medical Association in Edinburgh in 1898.
Giovanni Battista Grassi
The 1902 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Ronald Ross for his discovery of the life cycle of malarial parasite (or as the Nobel citation goes: "for his work on malaria, by which he has shown how it enters the organism..."). However, this was disputed and continues to be disputed to this day. Grassi was the first to suggest that there must be some developmental stage of "Plasmodium" in the white blood cells. In 1897, he and his associates established the developmental stages of malaria parasites in anopheline mosquitoes; and they described the complete life cycles of "P. falciparum", "P. vivax" and "P. malariae" the following year. When the Nobel nomination was called there began a fiery polemic over priority between him and Ross. The situation was worsened with the involvementof Robert Koch. The initial opinion of the Nobel Committee was that the prize should be shared between Ross and Grassi. Then Ross made a defamatory campaign accusing Grassi of deliberate fraud. Koch was appointed as a "neutral arbitrator" in the committee; and as reported, "[He] threw the full weight of his considerable authority in insisting that Grassi did not deserve the honor" (Grassi would later point out flaws in Koch own methodology on malarial research). Ross was the first to show that malarial parasite was transmitted by the bite of infected mosquitoes, in his case the avian "Plasmodium relictum". But Grassi's work revealed that human malarial parasites were carried only by female "Anopheles". He identified the mosquito species correctly, in his case "P. claviger". By today's standard, they are likely to have shared the Nobel prize.