The interesting thing about today is its World Mosquito Day. Maybe this will be a day when either the mosquitoes would spare you from bites or they go out for ‘drinks’ to celebrate their day (that would mean more bites).
Jokes apart, the reason why its celebrated dedicated as such is because Malarial Parasite’s lifecycle was discovered on this day.
It was Britain’s Sir Ronald Ross working in the Presidency General Hospital in Calcutta who finally proved in 1898 that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes. He did this by showing that certain mosquito species transmit malaria to birds and isolating malaria parasites from the salivary glands of mosquitoes that had fed on infected birds. For this work Ross received the 1902 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Source –Wikipedia.
It all began on August 16, 1897, in a little laboratory in Hyderabad, India when Dr. Ronald Ross, a renowned physician, began dissecting mosquitoes that had fed on a malarious patient. On August 20, he dissected another mosquito, and found many of these cells on the stomach wall of the mosquito. He concluded that these were the malaria parasite stages in the mosquito.
As the above author suggest, shouldn’t it be World’s Malaria Day or something? Are we giving a day to the mosquito that is spreading the disease?
By the way who is naming the days? I am posting this late night, well a mosquito’s active ‘day’ starts now.
Update : The quote from Wikipedia suggest that he was working in Calcutta when he made the discovery, but the link to Sir Ronald Ross would make it clear that he was in Secundrabad.
