• Question: is malaria contagious

    Asked by Annie to Liz on 12 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Liz Buckingham-Jeffery

      Liz Buckingham-Jeffery answered on 12 Jun 2017:

      Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. If I had malaria, I wouldn’t be directly contagious to you. But if there were other mosquitoes around they could spread it from me to you.

      It works like this:
      I catch malaria.
      A new mosquito bites me, and then that mosquito gets infected by me.
      That newly infected mosquito bites you.
      So now you might get infected.

      So I could only spread malaria to you via a mosquito. It doesn’t directly spread from person to person (as far as I know!). Does that make sense?

Comments

  • christldonnelly commented on :

    It is contagious, but not directly. The mosquito carries the parasitic infection from one infected person to later infect an uninfected one. Some birds suffer from avian malaria. There again it is the mosquitos that are carrying the infections from one bird to another.

    If we didn’t have mosquitoes, then no malaria, but some chemicals that have been used to kill mosquitoes are highly toxic to other animals. So scientists are working on new techniques to reduce transmission risks.

  • Photo: Rosie

    Rosie commented on :

    There has been a documented UK hospital outbreak of malaria, with person to person spread in the absence of mosquitoes. It was due to the use of a bottle of solution to make up medicines. The same bottle used for a small number of different patients, and it was contaminated with the blood of a patient who had malaria. So, other patients who had never been to a country with malaria or been bitten by a malaria carrying mosquito did get infected with malaria. Clever infectious disease doctors and epidemiologists worked it out and stopped the outbreak. This is VERY rare situation though. Single dose vials of fluid are used now, and this wouldn’t happen again.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/307066.stm
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/642721.stm