Because it is real...

In Africa, a child dies of malaria every 30 seconds.

The word malaria is derived from the Italian for "bad air" because of the early belief that the disease was caused by breathing the stale, warm, humid air found in swamps.

The poliovirus consists of exactly 11 genes, whereas the malaria genome includes more than 5,000.

A company based in Maryland, USA, is working on a malaria vaccine that attempts to attack all of malaria's genes. The company is called Sanaria, when means "healthy air."

Of the four kinds of malaria parasites, known as Plasmodium, that can infect humans, the most dangerous is called falciparum. When a flaciparum parasite invades a liver cell, it produces more than 30,000 daughter cells, which are released into the blood when the liver cell ruptures. Recent studies suggest that the parasite is showing resistance to the most potent drug use to combat malaria, called artemisinin.

In 1880, A French army surgeon stationed in Constantine, Algeria, discovered parasites in the blood of patients suffering from malaria, For this achievement, Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran won the Nobel Prize in 1907. Sir Ronald Ross, a British army general, won a Nobel Prize in 1902 for proving that mosquitoes spread malaria. The disease it transmitted by the female Anopheles mosquitoes.

Insecticide-treated mosquito nets are the principal way to protect children from nocturnal Anopheles mosquitoes that feed indoors. Arecent survey of 2,960 households in Kenya found that 92 percent of the children whose families had at least one net had slept under it the night before the survey was conducted. The same study showed that less than 60 percent of the families surveyed owned a net, which cost about $10. Since May 2006, the nonprofit Nothing But Nets had raised more than $18 million and purchased more than 700,000 treated nets.

Worldwide, malaria is the fourth-leading cause of death in children under five years old. Potentially lifesaving treatments for the disease can cost less than $3; one of the most popular treatments cost less than 15 cents a dose.

-Jason Grotto, THE ROTARIAN, May 2009

This isn't something that just kills children. A lot of orphans in Ethiopa have lost parents due to malaria. I was excited to hear that they are working on a treatment and thought I would share my findings.