Mosquito-malaria theory

Mosquito-malaria theory (or sometimes mosquito theory) was a scientific theory developed in the latter half of the 19th century that solved the question of how malaria was transmitted. The theory proposed that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes, in opposition to the centuries-old medical dogma that malaria was due to bad air, or miasma. The first scientific idea was postulated in 1851 by Charles E. Johnson, who argued that miasma had no direct relationship with malaria. Although Johnson's hypothesis was forgotten, the arrival and validation of the germ theory of diseases in the late 19th century began to shed new lights.^[1] When Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran discovered that malaria was caused by a protozoan parasite in 1880, the miasma theory began to subside.^[2][3][4]

An important discovery was made by Patrick Manson in 1877 that mosquitos could transmit human filarial parasite.^[5] Inferring from such novel discovery, Albert Freeman Africanus King proposed the hypothesis that mosquitoes were the source of malaria.^[6] In the early 1890s Manson himself began to formulate the complete hypothesis, which he eventually called the mosquito-malaria theory. According to Manson, malaria was transmitted from human to human by a mosquito.^[7][8] The theory was scientifically proved by Manson's confidant Ronald Ross of the Indian Medical Service in the late 1890s. Ross discovered that malaria was transmitted by the biting of specific species of mosquito.^[9] For this Ross won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902.^[10] Further experimental proof was provided by Manson who induced malaria in healthy human subjects from malaria-carrying mosquitoes.^[8] Thus the theory became the foundation of malariology and the strategy of control of malaria.^[11][12]