the.com/malaria
Malaria still kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, most of them young children.
means A serious, sometimes fatal disease caused by a parasite that mosquitoes inject into your blood when they bite you, bringing fevers, chills, and sweats in brutal cycles.
from From Italian 'mala aria' — literally 'bad air.' Long before anyone knew about parasites or mosquitoes, people living near swamps and marshes got sick and blamed the foul-smelling vapors rising off stagnant water. The name stuck even after the 19th-century discovery that the real culprit wasn't air at all, but a tiny parasite (Plasmodium) riding in on a mosquito's bite — one of medicine's great cases of getting the diagnosis right and the reasoning completely wrong.
- name origin
- Italian for bad air, blamed on swamps not bugs
- actual cause
- plasmodium parasite, not the mosquito itself
- death toll
- kills roughly 600,000 people yearly, mostly children
- ancient resume
- found in Egyptian mummies and Tutankhamun's genome