Malaria and Nkadu Luo

QUESTION

When did professor Nkadu Luo discover that female mosquito causes malaria?

ANSWER

Professor Nkadu Luo is a microbiologist and immunologist in Zambia. Most of her work has been on HIV/AIDS and sickle cell anaemia. She has also been a key figure in promoting screening of blood banks in Zambia for infectious diseases such as HIV and malaria. However, the discovery that female mosquitoes transmit malaria was made much earlier—taxonomists as early as the mid-19th century were aware of differences in the mouthparts between male and female mosquitoes of certain species, which allowed them to determine that they were feeding on different things (female mosquitoes who feed on blood have very specialised mouthparts, for example).

Then, in the late 1890s, a British doctor called Ronald Ross discovered that mosquitoes transmit malaria parasites when they feed on blood. Prof Luo probably learned about the cycle of malaria transmission during her extensive biomedical training.