Mosquito-borne disease
Mosquito-borne diseases or mosquito-borne illnesses are diseases caused by bacteria, viruses or parasites transmitted by mosquitoes. They can transmit disease without being affected themselves. Nearly 700 million people get a mosquito-borne illness each year resulting in over one million deaths.
Mosquito-malaria theory
The notion that malaria was due to miasma was negated by the discovery of malarial parasite. A German physician Johann Heinrich Meckel was the first to observed in 1847 the protozoan parasites as black pigment granules from the blood and spleen of a patient who died of malaria. But he did not understand the parasitic nature and significance of those granules in connection with malaria. In 1849 a German pathologist Rudolf Virchow realised that it could be those granules that were responsible for the disease. In 1879 an Italian biologist Ettore Afanasiev further argued that the granules were definitely the causative agents.
A major discovery was made by a French Army physician Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran working in Algeria, North Africa. At the hospital in Bône (now Annaba), he noticed spherical bodies from a patient’s blood film, free or adherent to red blood cells. On 6 November 1880 he observed from one patient's blood the actual living parasite, describing it as "a pigmented spherical body, filiform elements which move with great vivacity, displacing the neighboring red blood cells." He also observed the process of maturation of the parasite (which is now called exflagellation of microgametocytes). He meticulously examined 200 patients, and noted the cellular bodies in all 148 cases of malaria but never in those without malaria. He also found that after treatment with quinine, the parasites disappeared from blood. These findings clearly indicated that the parasite was the cause of malaria, and establishing the germ theory (nature) of malaria. He named the parasite "Oscillaria malariae" (later renamed "Plasmodium malariae") and reported his discovery to the French Academy of Medicine in Paris on 23 November and 28 December. For his discovery he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1907.