Birth of Ronald Ross

Ronald Ross was born on 13 May 1857 in Almora. A British physician, Ross worked for the Indian Medical Service, and proved in 1897 that malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes, by finding the parasite in the stomach of an Anopheles mosquito that had fed on an infected patient. His discovery, made in Secunderabad, showed how to prevent the disease by controlling mosquitoes, and he campaigned for sanitary measures in Africa and elsewhere. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1902. He also wrote poems, novels and plays, and was a skilled mathematician who created models of how epidemics spread. He was a professor in Liverpool.

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