World Mosquito Day
Next: August 20, 2027
The day a mosquito gave up its secret.
The story
Where it comes from
World Mosquito Day marks 20 August 1897, when Ronald Ross, a British doctor in the Indian Medical Service, found the malaria parasite in an Anopheles mosquito at Secunderabad in India, the proof that mosquitoes carry the disease. After two and a half years of failures, he dissected a mosquito that had fed on a malaria patient four days earlier and found strange round cells holding dark pigment. He went home for tea, and the next day his last mosquito showed the cells had grown. Ross always called the anniversary 'Mosquito Day'.
How it's celebrated
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, which keeps Ross's notebooks and microscope, marks the day each year, a custom that goes back to a party held for Ross at the Ross Institute in London on 20 August 1931, his dog Binkie in pride of place. Health groups use the day to talk about malaria and how to prevent it, and anyone can join in by learning how mosquito-borne diseases spread where they live.
Did you know
- Ross was born in Almora, in the Indian Himalayas, and loved poetry and music as well as mathematics, which he used to model how malaria spreads.
- His Nobel Prize in 1902 was the first won by a British scientist, and only the second ever awarded for medicine.
- Ross urged action against mosquitoes as soon as he had caught the culprit, and the measures brought striking results in places including the Federated Malay States, now part of Malaysia.
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