• Question: How do Mosquito's get malaria in the first place? i dont actually get where they get it from

    Asked by popthebottle to Meeks, Pete, Stephen, Steve, Tom on 19 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Marieke Navin

      Marieke Navin answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      hey popthebottle. I don’t think Mosquitos get malaria, they simply carry it around. They carry blood and if the blood is infected then they carry that too. When they break your skin and have a good drink a little bit of the blood is still left in their feeding tube (sorry don;t know what it’s called). So when they go and bite someone else, a bit of the first blood is still in their tube so this goes into the next person, spreading the disease. Yuck.

    • Photo: Stephen Curry

      Stephen Curry answered on 19 Jun 2010:

      Vey interesting question popthebottle!

      Mosquitos don’t ‘get’ malaria in the same way that humans do even though they carry the germ that causes it. Malaria is caused by a single-celled micro-organism of the type plasmodium. This is a very complex type of organism that can has several different forms during its life (a bit like the way a butterfly starts out as a caterpillar).

      I’m not an expert but the plasmodium can reproduce in the stomachs of mosquitos, where it forms bumps or cysts. When these break open the plasmodium cells travel to the salivary glands of the insect.

      When the mossie bites you to feed on blood, they also inject saliva since this contains chemicals to stop the blood from clotting and blocking the insect’s feeding tube.

      As the mossie injects the saliva, the plasmodium bugs get transferred to you. They can infect your liver and but also, eventually, your red blood cells. So if another mosquito comes along and bites you again later, it picks up the plasmodium and it gets infected.

      So both humans and mossie are put at the service of the microorganisms. Unfortunately for us, malaria is a very dangerous disease – one of the most deadly we know. It kills well over a million people a year.

      As a result it’s something that is very important to study (a lot of people here at Imperial College are working on it), even though it is very interesting in its own right. Did you know, for example, that before people knew the disease was transmitted by mossies, they thought it was just due to the ‘bad air’ that you get near swampy areas. That’s why it’s called mal-aria (which means bad air). We now know that it can be caught near swamps because mosquitos like to lay their eggs in stagnant water.

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