What is Malaria?

Answer:

The word malaria comes from 18th century Italian mala meaning "bad" and aria meaning "air".

Malaria is a potentially fatal blood disease caused by a parasite that is transmitted to human and animal hosts by the Anopheles mosquito. The human parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, is dangerous not only because it digests the red blood cells haemoglobin, but also because it changes the adhesive properties of the cell it inhabits.

This change in turn causes the cell to stick to the walls of blood vessels. It becomes especially dangerous when the infected blood cells stick to the capillaries in the brain, obstructing blood flow, a condition called cerebral malaria. Scientists using the X-ray microscope are hoping to learn more about how the parasite infects and disrupts the blood cells and the blood vessels of an infected host.