Malaria in the context of "Ronald Ross"

In epidemiology, an infection is said to be endemic in a specific population or populated place when that infection is constantly present, or maintained at a baseline level, without extra infections being brought into the group as a result of travel or similar means. The term describes the distribution of an infectious disease among a group of people or animals or within a populated area. An endemic disease always has a steady, predictable number of people or animals getting sick, but that number can be high (hyperendemic) or low (hypoendemic), and the disease can be severe or mild. Also, a disease that is usually endemic can become epidemic.

For example, chickenpox is endemic in the United Kingdom, but malaria is not. Every year, there are a few cases of malaria reported in the UK, but these do not lead to sustained transmission in the population due to the lack of a suitable vector (mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles). Consequently, there is no constant baseline level of malaria infection in the UK, and the disease is not endemic. However, the number of people who get chickenpox in the UK varies little from year to year, so chickenpox is considered endemic in the UK.

The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage. Europeans established a coastal slave trade in the 15th century, and trade to the Americas began in the 16th century, lasting through the 19th century. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central Africa and West Africa and had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Western hemisphere. Some Portuguese and Europeans participated in slave raids. As the National Museums Liverpool explains: "European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bought most of them from local African or African-European dealers." European slave traders generally did not participate in slave raids. This was primarily because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade due to malaria that was endemic to the African continent. Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.

The colonial South Atlantic and Caribbean economies were particularly dependent on slave labour for the production of sugarcane and other commodities. This was viewed as crucial by those Western European states which were vying with one another to create overseas empires. The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to transport slaves across the Atlantic. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil. Other Europeans soon followed. Shipowners regarded the slaves as cargo to be transported to the Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible, there to be sold to work on coffee, tobacco, cocoa, sugar, and cotton plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, the construction industry, cutting timber for ships, as skilled labour, and as domestic servants. The first enslaved Africans sent to the English colonies were classified as indentured servants, with legal standing similar to that of contract-based workers coming from Britain and Ireland. By the middle of the 17th century, slavery had hardened as a racial caste, with African slaves and their future offspring being legally the property of their owners, as children born to slave mothers were also slaves (partus sequitur ventrem). As property, the people were considered merchandise or units of labour, and were sold at markets with other goods and services.

Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps (French: [də lesɛps]; 19 November 1805 – 7 December 1894) was a French Orientalist diplomat and later developer of the Suez Canal, which in 1869, joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas, substantially reducing sailing distances and times between Europe and East Asia.

He attempted to repeat this success with an effort to build a Panama Canal at sea level during the 1880s, but the project was devastated by epidemics of malaria and yellow fever in the area, as well as by financial problems, and the planned Lesseps Panama Canal was never completed. Eventually, the project was bought out by the United States, which solved the medical problems and changed the design to a non-sea- level canal with locks. It was completed in 1914.

This is a list of the largest known epidemics and pandemics caused by an infectious disease in humans. Widespread non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer are not included. An epidemic is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of people in a given population within a short period of time; in meningococcal infections, an attack rate in excess of 15 cases per 100,000 people for two consecutive weeks is considered an epidemic. Due to the long time spans, the first plague pandemic (6th century – 8th century) and the second plague pandemic (14th century – early 19th century) are shown by individual outbreaks, such as the Plague of Justinian (first pandemic) and the Black Death (second pandemic).

Infectious diseases with high prevalence are listed separately (sometimes in addition to their epidemics), such as malaria, which may have killed 50–60 million people.

In epidemiology, a disease vector is any living agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen such as a parasite or microbe, to another living organism. Agents regarded as vectors are mostly blood-sucking (hematophagous) arthropods such as mosquitoes. The first major discovery of a disease vector came from Ronald Ross in 1897, who discovered the malaria pathogen when he dissected the stomach tissue of a mosquito.The process of proving that a vector is responsible for transmitting pathogens is called vector incrimination.

Parasitism is a close relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives (at least some of the time) on or inside another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life. The entomologist E. O. Wilson characterised parasites' way of feeding as "predators that eat prey in units of less than one". Parasites include single-celled protozoans such as the agents of malaria, sleeping sickness, and amoebic dysentery; animals such as hookworms, lice, mosquitoes, and vampire bats; fungi such as honey fungus and the agents of ringworm; and plants such as mistletoe, dodder, and the broomrapes.

There are six major parasitic strategies of exploitation of animal hosts, namely parasitic castration, directly transmitted parasitism (by contact), trophically-transmitted parasitism (by being eaten), vector-transmitted parasitism, parasitoidism, and micropredation. One major axis of classification concerns invasiveness: an endoparasite lives inside the host's body; an ectoparasite lives outside, on the host's surface.

The second of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals focuses on achieving Universal Primary Education. This goal aims to ensure global access to complete primary education for all children, regardless of gender, by 2015. Education plays a crucial role in achieving all Millennium Development Goals, as it equips future generations with the necessary tools to combat poverty and prevent diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS.

Despite recognizing the importance of educational investment, a joint report by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and UNICEF titled "Fixing the Broken Promise of Education for All: Findings from the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children" revealed that the 2015 target for universal primary education was not met. The report indicated that as of 2015, approximately 58 million children of primary school age worldwide were not receiving formal education.

Anopheles (/əˈnɒfɪliːz/) is a genus of mosquito first described by the German entomologist J. W. Meigen in 1818, and are known as nail mosquitoes and marsh mosquitoes. Many such mosquitoes are vectors of the parasite Plasmodium, a genus of protozoans that cause malaria in birds, reptiles, and mammals, including humans. The Anopheles gambiae mosquito is the best-known species of marsh mosquito that transmits the Plasmodium falciparum, which is a malarial parasite deadly to human beings; no other mosquito genus is a vector of human malaria.

The genus Anopheles diverged from other mosquitoes approximately 100 million years ago (mya), and, like other mosquitoes, the eggs, larvae, and pupae are aquatic. The Anopheles larva has no respiratory siphon through which to breathe, so it breathes and feeds with its body horizontal to the surface of the water. The adult mosquito hatches from the surface and feeds on the nectar of flowers; the female mosquito also feeds on blood, which animal diet allows them to carry and transmit parasites between hosts. The adult's feeding position is head-down, unlike the horizontal stance of the culicines. Anopheles are distributed almost worldwide, throughout the tropics, the subtropics, and the temperate regions of planet Earth. In hot weather, adult Anopheles aestivate, which is a state of dormancy that enables the mosquito to survive in hot dry regions, such as the Sahel.

Edward Thomas Daniell (6 June 1804 – 24 September 1842) was an English artist known for his etchings and the landscape paintings he made during an expedition to the Middle East, including Lycia, part of modern-day Turkey. He is associated with the Norwich School of painters, a group of artists connected by location and personal and professional relationships, who were mainly inspired by the Norfolk countryside.

Born in London to wealthy parents, Daniell grew up and was educated in Norwich, where he was taught art by John Crome and Joseph Stannard. After graduating in classics at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1828, he was ordained as a curate at Banham in 1832 and appointed to a curacy at St. Mark's Church, London, in 1834. He became a patron of the arts, and an influential friend of the artist John Linnell. In 1840, after resigning his curacy and leaving England for the Middle East, he travelled to Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and joined the explorer Sir Charles Fellows's archaeological expedition in Lycia as an illustrator. He contracted malaria there and reached Adalia (now known as Antalya) intending to recuperate, but died from a second attack of the disease.