How Humans Made Malaria So Deadly

To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords: 

• Malaria - a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes.
• Parasite - an organism that benefits by living in/on a host organism and deriving nutrients at the host's expense.
• Host - an organism in/on which another organism lives.
• Protozoa - a group of single-celled microscopic animals (not bacteria or viruses) that includes the Plasmodium species.
• Plasmodium - a genus of parasitic protozoa, many of which cause malaria in their hosts. Four species regularly infect humans: P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae, & P. ovale.
• P. falciparum - the Plasmodium species that kills the most people, by causing malignant malaria, the most dangerous form of malaria.
• Anopheles gambiae - a ‘complex' of at least seven species of mosquitoes that are the main vectors of P. falciparum in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Species complex - a group of closely related species that look so similar that the boundaries between them are often unclear.
• Hunting and gathering - depending primarily on wild foods for subsistence
• Paleontology - the study of fossils and what fossils tell us about the past, about evolution, and about how humans fit into the world.

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