Scientists estimate that last year alone upwards of 300-500 million people contracted malaria and well over a million people, mostly children, died from the disease. For those areas affected by the disease, the economic impact is enormous. Each time a person gets the disease they can expect to miss 5-20 days of work, and chronically infected families on average lose more than twenty five percent of their yearly income. In the countries where the disease is a nationwide epidemic, malaria patients occupy 3 out of 10 hospital beds, and the net effect can be a 5 percent drop in the nation's Gross National Product. The main reason malaria is so hard to control has to do with the nature of the disease and the way it is spread.
Malaria is neither a virus nor a bacterium, but a one-celled parasite.
The parasites breed in and are transmitted by mosquitoes. When the mosquito bites a person, the parasites get into the new host's bloodstream through the mosquito's saliva. From there the parasites head directly for the liver. To insure their success in infecting the human body, they further multiply in the liver cells for 9 to 16 days. They then pour out into the blood stream and begin feeding on red blood cells.