Mosquito or man? : the conquest of the tropical world / by Sir Rubert W. Boyce.
- Rubert William Boyce
- Date:
- 1910
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Mosquito or man? : the conquest of the tropical world / by Sir Rubert W. Boyce. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![THE MOSQUITO AND MALARIA 3] left to Major Ross to demonstrate in a most convincing manner that the mosquito was the cause of the spread of malaria. Thus a situation which at one time appeared hopeless is now, on the contrary, full of hope, and the tropics are rapidly becoming possible for Europeans. Ross showed, as we shall see presently, that when anopheline mosquitos, not all mosquitos, sucked blood from a person suffering from malaria, that the parasites which they sucked up in their meal of blood developed in their stomach, and, after certain developmental stages, reached the salivary glands, from whence they were transmitted to man again. In other words, the anopheline plays the part of intermediate host, just like the dog does in some forms of tapeworm disease, and the cyclops in the case of the guinea-worm disease. It is most important to recollect this, for it proves that the mosquito is necessary to the complete life-cycle of the malarial parasite, and that the former does not merely mechani- cally carry the parasite from man to man like the common house-fly does. ‘The latter picks up on_ its body or mouth parts the infected material, and trans- fers it on to the first object it alights upon. We can state the case for the mosquito thus: For the complete life-cycle of the malaria parasite, the special mosquito—the anopheline—is as necessary as man. ‘The date when the parasite was discovered in the blood of man, and how Ross proved that it passed part of its life-cycle in the body of the anopheline, will be set forth in a subsequent chapter.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b31367136_0059.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
