Her abdomen full of blood that will nourish her eggs, a female Anopheles mosquito takes to the air. Her next landing may be a dangerous one—for the human who receives her bite. The female Anopheles mosquito is the only insect capable of carrying the human malaria parasite. When she jabs her proboscis into a person's epidermis to drink blood, she sprays the bite area with saliva that serves as an anticoagulant. If her last victim had malaria, that saliva will contain one-celled malaria parasites called plasmodia, a couple of dozen of which can enter the human bloodstream. But it only takes one to kill a person. When her minutes-long feeding is over, she will have spread the deadly menace to yet another victim.
Photograph by Hugh Sturrock
The invasion has begun. Microscopic magnification shows Plasmodium falciparum—the most virulent of the four malaria parasites that infect humans—destroying red blood cells in the liver. It digests a cell's hemoglobin, multiplies inside to the point of rupturing the cell, and rapidly spreads a new generation of infection.
Photograph by Albert Bonniers Forlag
