Researchers call it a potential "game-changer"
Observed annually on August 20, World Mosquito Day commemorates the 1897 discovery by British doctor Sir Ronald Ross that malaria is transferred by mosquitoes. Browse the following gallery and find out why such a malevolent, bloodsucking, and supremely annoying insect gets its own special day out. Click on!
Complementing World Mosquito Day is World Malaria Day, observed annually on April 25 to recognize and commemorate the global efforts to control malaria. It was established in 2007 by the World Health Organization.
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The Malaria Commission of the League of Nations collected larvae on the Danube delta in 1929 to further the research.
For his discovery of the life cycle of the malarial parasite, Ross won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to him in 1902.
In 1890, the Italian physician, together with colleague Raimondo Filetti, first introduced the names Plasmodium vivax and P. malariae for two of the malaria parasites that affect humans. He also discovered that only female anopheline mosquitoes are capable of transmitting the disease.
This contemporary false-colored electron micrograph shows a A Plasmodium from the saliva of a female mosquito moving across a mosquito cell.
The foundations of his research were laid in India. In 1889, he established the importance of mosquitoes as intermediate hosts in avian malaria. Soon afterwards, he discovered that the salivary gland was the storage site of malarial parasites in the mosquito, and that the parasites were released from the gland during biting.
The medicine from the bark is now known as the antimalarial, quinine—still an effective antimalarial drug and an alternative to artemisinins.
The mosquito in this Baltic Sea amber is between 40 and 60 million years old.
But not all mosquitoes are responsible for this suffering, elaborates Oxitec.
In the early 17th century, Spanish Jesuit missionaries in Peru learned from indigenous tribes of a medicinal bark used to treat fevers.
The mosquito goes through four separate and distinct stages of its life cycle: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. Depending on conditions, the life cycle can range from four days to as long as a month.
"Every year, her bite spreads diseases and parasites that kill almost one million people and cause debilitating illnesses in hundreds of millions more," notes the British biotechnology company.
Use of mosquito nets has been dated to prehistoric times. Modern nets are made from cotton, polypropylene, and nylon, among other materials. A mesh size of 1.2 mm (0.047 in) stops mosquitoes.
The diseases Aedes aegypti is known to carry include zika, dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever, and malaria.
Why do we celebrate World Mosquito Day?
The world's deadliest insect has its own day
HEALTH Bugs
Observed annually on August 20, World Mosquito Day commemorates the 1897 discovery by British doctor Sir Ronald Ross that malaria is transferred by mosquitoes. Browse the following gallery and find out why such a malevolent, bloodsucking, and supremely annoying insect gets its own special day out. Click on!