Malaria in Rural Tanzania
Monica Thompson
SOC300

August 29, 2012

Dr. Mark Perry

Introduction

Approximately half of the world's population is at risk for contracting malaria, particularly those living in lower-income countries” (WHO, 2013). It is a major public health issue that plagues developing countries around the world; however, “more than seventy percent of the total morbidity is in Africa” (Snow et al., 2005). Although both preventive measures and treatments exist, malaria prevails as one of the biggest killers in Sub-Saharan Africa. Children, pregnant women and HIV-infected individuals are most susceptible to contracting the illness. Tanzania, located in east Africa, is among one of the poorest of countries in the world and is burdened with malaria. There are several factors that contribute to the malaria endemic in Tanzania, including: poverty, environmental and special factors, and access to healthcare.

Background

Malaria has been in existence since 2700 B.C. (Lambert, 2003). In fact, the ancient Chinese wrote about its symptoms in their medical writings. It is believed to have originated in Western-Africa. In 1879 Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a Public Health researcher began his studies on malaria in an Algerian hospital. He noticed that there was a pigment in the blood of people who suffered from malaria, but he was unsure of what that pigment was. After ten years of extensive research, he discovered that the pigment was a parasite, the agent for malaria (Lambert, 2003). Soon after Alphonse’s breakthrough, Ronald Ross, a British army officer discovered that the vector for malaria is a mosquito (Lambert, 2003). In 1890, Giovanni Batista Grassi and Raimondo Filetti named Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium malaria as the two parasites that affected humans (CDC, 2010).