Dia Mundial do Mosquito

Esta é novidade para muita gente. Pouca gente deve saber desta homenagem. Em 20 de agosto de 1897, Ronald Ross demonstrou a transmissão da malária pelo Anopheles. Ele ganhou o Prêmio Nobel em 1902 por esta descoberta.

Do Alpha Galileo: “Declaring himself that this date be remembered as World Mosquito Day, his work was soon verified by a colleague, Surgeon-Major John Smyth and Ross wrote a paper which was later published in the British Medical Journal.”

Na Wikipedia: “Ross studied malaria between 1881 and 1899. He worked on malaria in Calcutta at the Presidency General Hospital where he was ably assisted by Kishori Mohan Bandyopadhyay, a Bengali Indian scientist. In 1883, Ross was posted as the Acting Garrison Surgeon at Bangalore during which time he noticed the possibility of controlling mosquitoes by controlling their access to water.

In 1897, Ross was posted in Ooty and fell ill with malaria. After this he was transferred to Secunderabad, where Osmania University and its medical school is located, he discovered the presence of the malarial parasite within a specific species of mosquito, the Anopheles. He initially called them dapple-wings and following the hypothesis of Sir Patrick Manson that the agent that causes malaria was spread by the mosquito, he was able to find the malaria parasite in a mosquito that he artificially fed on a malaria patient named Hussain Khan. Later using birds that were sick with malaria, he was soon able to ascertain the entire life cycle of the malarial parasite, including its presence in the mosquito's salivary glands. He demonstrated that malaria is transmitted from infected birds to healthy ones by the bite of a mosquito, a finding that suggested the disease's mode of transmission to humans. Subsequently Sir Ronald Ross Institute of Tropical Medicine was established as a division of the faculty of medicine at Osmanaia Medical College, Hyderabad.

Mais sobre Ross.

Ilustração.