2023-11-06 00:00:00
Just take a deep breath in Buenos Aires! At least that’s what the Spanish conquerors thought when they anchored on the Rio de la Plata for the first time in the 16th century and founded the settlement of “good air”. Here they were safe from the deadly “bad air disease,” which is the literal translation from Latin for the tropical disease malaria.
Because that’s how people explained the spread of this disease back then. European medicine has long agreed that malaria is caused by so-called miasmas: mysterious vapors from the ground that bring illness and death. That only changed through the work of an “underdog”.
The daily rearview mirror
This column on mostly non-circular anniversaries in science, technology, nature and medicine appears every week in the Science section, also in the printed newspaper.
On November 6, 1880, 143 years ago today, the French military doctor Alphonse Laveran saw the malaria pathogen for the first time through the lens of his microscope. He is stationed in Algeria, which was still under French colonial rule at the time. When malaria became rampant in the troops, Laveran examined hundreds of soldiers. He makes a groundbreaking discovery: tiny, almost transparent organisms swim in the blood of the sick.
Malaria is caused by parasites, Laveran writes to his colleagues in Europe. But they don’t take the unknown Laveran seriously. After all, more renowned researchers had only recently announced that they had found a malaria bacterium. At this time, the belief that illnesses are caused by pathogens and not by unexplained winds is gradually gaining ground. But which pathogens are the culprits is still far from clear.
Only when the famous Louis Pasteur took Laveran’s side did the experts believe him. His discovery finally leads medicine on the right track: Malaria is actually not caused by a bacterium, but by the parasite Plasmodium caused by the disease, which lodges itself in the red blood cells and – as we found out a few years later – is transmitted by mosquitoes.
Read more daily rearview mirror
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At the beginning of the 20th century, the first effective measures to combat malaria were finally established in medicine. The first vaccine has been available this year. In the long run, the academic outsider Laveran saved countless lives. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1907 for his discovery.
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