Timeline of Malaria
The history of malaria from Greek accounts of periodic fevers around 400 BCE through quinine, the discovery of the parasite and its mosquito vector, DDT-era eradication campaigns and artemisinin to the first vaccines in 2021 and 2023 and milestones through 2025.
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- Medicine & Health
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- 29 events ~400 BCE – 2025
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- by claude-opus-5-5
~400 BCE: Hippocratic writers classify recurring fevers
Greek medical texts attributed to Hippocrates distinguished fevers that returned every 48 hours (tertian) or every 72 hours (quartan), patterns now known to be typical of malaria, and connected enlarged spleens and poor health with living near marshes. Older Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Indian texts describe fevers that may have been malaria, and ancient DNA studies have reported falciparum infections in Egyptian mummies, including Tutankhamun's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_malaria#Classical_period4th century: Ge Hong prescribes sweet wormwood for fevers
The Chinese physician and alchemist Ge Hong's handbook of emergency remedies, the "Zhouhou Beiji Fang," advised soaking a handful of qinghao, or sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua), in water, wringing it out and drinking the juice to treat intermittent fevers. Its unheated preparation prompted Tu Youyou to try a low-temperature extraction in 1971, the step that led her team to artemisinin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge_Hong1630s: Jesuits carry cinchona bark to Europe
Jesuit missionaries in Peru learned of the bark of Andean cinchona trees as a remedy for fevers and sent it to Spain and Rome, where "Jesuit's bark" became Europe's first effective treatment for malaria; accounts date its arrival from the 1630s to the 1640s, and it entered the London Pharmacopoeia in 1677. The story that it cured a Countess of Chinchón, wife of the viceroy of Peru, is generally regarded as a legend, though Carl Linnaeus named the genus Cinchona after her in 1742.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit%27s_bark1820: Pelletier and Caventou isolate quinine
The French chemists Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou extracted and named quinine, the main antimalarial alkaloid of cinchona bark, which until then had been ground and taken in liquids such as wine. Purified quinine made standard doses possible, and historians credit its use as a preventive, widespread from about 1850, with helping European colonial expansion into tropical Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinine1865: Manuel Incra Mamani collects high-quinine cinchona seeds
Manuel Incra Mamani, a Bolivian bark collector working for the British trader Charles Ledger, gathered seeds from an unusually quinine-rich cinchona despite Andean bans on their export. The Dutch government bought them and grew the species, named Cinchona ledgeriana after Ledger, in Java, whose plantations dominated the world's quinine supply by the early 20th century; Mamani was arrested and beaten on a later collecting trip and died of his injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Incra_Mamani1880: Laveran sees malaria parasites in human blood
Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a French army physician at the military hospital in Constantine, Algeria, saw pigmented bodies inside red blood cells and moving filaments in fresh blood from malaria patients and concluded that a protozoan parasite caused the disease. Doubted by researchers who favored a bacterial cause, the finding was accepted by about 1890 as Italian scientists confirmed it and named the genus Plasmodium; Laveran received the 1907 Nobel Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Louis_Alphonse_Laveran1897: Ross finds malaria parasites in mosquitoes
Guided by Patrick Manson, who suspected that mosquitoes spread malaria, Ronald Ross of the Indian Medical Service found pigmented parasite bodies in the stomach wall of "dapple-winged" mosquitoes, later identified as Anopheles, that had fed on a malaria patient in Secunderabad on August 20. In Calcutta in 1898 he traced a bird malaria parasite to the salivary glands of Culex mosquitoes and showed that their bites infected healthy sparrows; he received the 1902 Nobel Prize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Ross1898: Grassi's team shows Anopheles transmit human malaria
In Rome, Giovanni Battista Grassi, Amico Bignami and Giuseppe Bastianelli fed Anopheles mosquitoes on malaria patients, followed the parasites' development inside them and gave malaria to a healthy volunteer through their bites, reporting to the Accademia dei Lincei in November and December; by 1899 they had traced the cycle of all three human species then recognized. Ross and Grassi fought bitterly over priority, and the 1902 Nobel Prize went to Ross alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Grassi1904: Gorgas attacks mosquitoes on the Panama Canal
William C. Gorgas, the U.S. Army physician put in charge of sanitation when the United States took over the canal project, had swamps drained, breeding pools oiled, houses screened and fumigated and the sick isolated, and handed out quinine. Yellow fever had virtually disappeared from the Canal Zone by 1906 and malaria deaths fell sharply, though death rates stayed far higher among the Black workers who made up most of the workforce, many of whom lived outside the treated areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_measures_during_the_construction_of_the_Panama_Canal1934: Bayer chemists synthesize chloroquine
Hans Andersag and colleagues at Bayer in Germany, then part of IG Farben, whose chemists had already produced the synthetic antimalarials pamaquine and mepacrine, made chloroquine, named Resochin, but shelved it after tests wrongly suggested it was too toxic. After Japan seized Java's cinchona plantations in 1942 and Allied troops captured a close relative, sontochin, in Tunis in 1943, U.S. trials showed chloroquine to be safe and effective; it entered clinical use in 1947 and replaced quinine as the main treatment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloroquine1939: Müller discovers DDT's power as an insecticide
Paul Hermann Müller at the Swiss chemical company J. R. Geigy found that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), first synthesized in 1874, was a potent and long-lasting contact poison for insects. Allied forces used it against typhus-carrying lice and malaria mosquitoes in World War II, and spraying it on the inside walls of houses, tried in Italy in 1944, became the main weapon of postwar malaria campaigns; Müller received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hermann_M%C3%BCller1940: Brazil eradicates an invading African mosquito
An African mosquito long identified as Anopheles gambiae, and shown by DNA analysis in 2008 to be the related Anopheles arabiensis, was found in northeastern Brazil in 1930 and caused a severe malaria epidemic there in 1938. The Brazilian government and the Rockefeller Foundation, in a campaign led by Fred Soper from 1939, eliminated it from the Americas, mainly by treating breeding sites with the arsenic larvicide Paris green and spraying pyrethrum where adults rested, before DDT came into use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anopheles_gambiae1947 – 1951: United States eliminates endemic malaria
The Communicable Disease Center, founded in Atlanta in 1946 from a wartime malaria-control program and later renamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), ran a National Malaria Eradication Program that sprayed DDT inside millions of rural homes in the South. By the time the program ended, malaria was considered eliminated, though cases had already fallen sharply in the 1930s and historians debate how much the result owed to DDT rather than drainage, screening, treatment and social change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Malaria_Eradication_Program1948: Shortt and Garnham find the parasite's liver stage
In London, Henry Edward Shortt and Cyril Garnham showed that malaria parasites multiply in the liver before invading red blood cells, first in monkeys infected with Plasmodium cynomolgi and then in a human volunteer infected with Plasmodium vivax. The liver stage explained the gap of a week or more between an infective bite and parasites appearing in the blood; dormant liver forms behind the relapses of vivax malaria were demonstrated in 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Garnham1954: Allison links sickle-cell trait to malaria protection
Anthony Allison, an Oxford-trained geneticist who grew up in Kenya, reported from studies in East Africa that children carrying one copy of the sickle-cell gene had fewer falciparum malaria parasites in their blood, explaining why a gene that causes sickle-cell disease in people with two copies stays common where malaria is intense. It became a classic example of natural selection in humans; J. B. S. Haldane had earlier suggested a similar protective role for thalassemia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Clifford_Allison1955: World Health Assembly launches global eradication campaign
Encouraged by early successes with DDT, the Eighth World Health Assembly, meeting in Mexico City in May, approved the World Health Organization's Global Malaria Eradication Program, which sought to interrupt transmission by spraying insecticide on house walls and treating cases. The campaign helped eliminate malaria from Europe, Taiwan, much of the Caribbean and other areas and sharply reduced it in India and Sri Lanka, but most of tropical Africa was never brought into it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_malaria#WHO_programs_(1953–1969)1967: Nussenzweig protects mice with irradiated sporozoites
Ruth Nussenzweig and colleagues at New York University showed that mice injected with X-irradiated sporozoites, the parasite stage that mosquitoes inject, were protected against later infection with the rodent parasite Plasmodium berghei. Studies in human volunteers followed in the 1970s, and the circumsporozoite protein that she and her husband, Victor Nussenzweig, later identified on the sporozoite surface became the basis of the RTS,S and R21 vaccines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Sonntag_Nussenzweig1969: World Health Assembly shifts from eradication to control
Faced with DDT-resistant mosquitoes, chloroquine-resistant parasites, waning funds and an epidemic from 1968 in Sri Lanka, where spraying had cut cases to fewer than 30 a year in 1963 and 1964, the 22nd World Health Assembly accepted control where eradication was not yet feasible. The retreat preceded the 1972 U.S. ban on agricultural DDT, and the 2001 Stockholm Convention, which restricted DDT use among its parties, still allowed it for disease-vector control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Malaria_control1972: Tu Youyou's team isolates artemisinin
In Project 523, a secret Chinese military program begun in 1967 at North Vietnam's request to find drugs against chloroquine-resistant malaria, Tu Youyou's group at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing found in 1971 that a low-temperature extract of qinghao cleared parasites in infected mice and monkeys, then obtained its pure active compound, artemisinin. Other teams in Yunnan and Shandong crystallized it independently in 1973; Tu shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou1976: Trager and Jensen grow malaria parasites in culture
William Trager and James B. Jensen at Rockefeller University in New York kept Plasmodium falciparum multiplying continuously in human red blood cells in the laboratory, using an airtight candle jar to lower oxygen and raise carbon dioxide. Continuous culture, reported in Science in August, made the deadliest malaria parasite available for laboratory study of its biology and for screening drugs and vaccine candidates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Trager1990s: Trials show treated bed nets save children's lives
Bed nets treated with pyrethroid insecticides, developed in the 1980s with early tests in Burkina Faso and China, were evaluated in large randomized trials in the Gambia, Ghana, Kenya and Burkina Faso. A Cochrane review of such trials found that the nets cut deaths from all causes among children by 17 percent compared with no nets, saving about 5.6 lives a year for every 1,000 children protected, and insecticide-treated nets became the most widespread malaria intervention in Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_net#Insecticide-treated_nets2002: Global Fund begins financing malaria control
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, proposed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at a summit of African leaders in Abuja in 2001, began operations in Geneva in January. With the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative from 2005 and other donors, it paid for mass distribution of nets, rapid tests and artemisinin combination drugs; a 2015 study in Nature estimated that control measures had averted 663 million clinical cases in Africa since 2000 (range 542 million to 753 million), mostly through nets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Fund_to_Fight_AIDS,_Tuberculosis_and_Malaria2002: Genomes of the parasite and its mosquito published
In early October, papers in Nature and Science published the genome of Plasmodium falciparum, 23 million base pairs on 14 chromosomes encoding about 5,300 genes and the richest in A and T bases sequenced up to then, and that of its main African vector, the mosquito Anopheles gambiae. The sequences opened systematic searches for drug targets, vaccine antigens and the genes behind drug and insecticide resistance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmodium_falciparum#Genome2008: Artemisinin resistance appears in western Cambodia
Researchers reported in December that falciparum infections in western Cambodia, near the Thai border where chloroquine resistance had appeared in the late 1950s, were clearing unusually slowly after artemisinin treatment; a larger study confirmed it in 2009. The partial resistance, tracked across mainland Southeast Asia through kelch13 gene mutations identified as a marker in 2014, threatened artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), the first-line treatment in World Health Organization guidelines since 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin#Resistance2020: Artemisinin partial resistance emerges in Africa
A study in Nature Medicine found falciparum parasites with a kelch13 mutation conferring artemisinin partial resistance spreading in Rwanda, the first evidence of such resistance arising in Africa, though the combination drugs tested still cured more than 95 percent of patients. Similar findings followed from Uganda and Eritrea, and in December 2025 the World Health Organization reported partial resistance confirmed or suspected in at least eight African countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#Drug_resistance2021: China certified free of malaria
On June 30 the World Health Organization certified China malaria-free after four consecutive years without locally acquired cases, in a country that had reported about 30 million cases a year in the 1940s. Its campaign from the 1950s combined drugs, house spraying, removal of breeding sites, early large-scale use of insecticide-treated nets in the 1980s and Project 523's artemisinin; by late 2025 the organization had certified 47 countries and one territory, including Egypt in 2024.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_China#Malaria2021: World Health Organization recommends the RTS,S vaccine
On October 6 the World Health Organization recommended the RTS,S/AS01 vaccine, the first against malaria or any human parasitic disease to receive such a recommendation, for children in regions with moderate to high transmission of Plasmodium falciparum, in four doses from five months of age. Developed over some 30 years by GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) with the nonprofit PATH and African research centers, it had cut deadly severe malaria by 30 percent in pilots reaching more than 900,000 children in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTS,S2023: World Health Organization recommends the R21 vaccine
On October 2 the World Health Organization recommended R21/Matrix-M, developed by the University of Oxford's Jenner Institute and the Serum Institute of India, after trials in which three doses cut symptomatic malaria by 75 percent over 12 months where transmission is highly seasonal and by 66 percent on an age-based schedule. The organization noted that R21 and RTS,S had not been compared head to head; by late 2025, 24 countries had added malaria vaccines to routine childhood immunization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria_vaccine#R21/Matrix-M2025: Swissmedic approves a malaria drug for newborns
Swissmedic, the Swiss medicines regulator, approved Riamet Baby, also called Coartem Baby (artemether-lumefantrine), developed by Novartis with the nonprofit Medicines for Malaria Venture, as the first malaria medicine specifically formulated for newborns and young infants weighing 2 to less than 5 kilograms, who had previously been given formulations meant for older children. Eight African countries took part in the assessment under a Swiss procedure intended to speed approvals there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemether/lumefantrine