Question: I know that malaria is spread via mosquitoes, but what exactly causes it in the first place?

Helen Fletcher answered on 21 Jun 2011:

Hello! Good question I do some work on malaria but there are lots of people in my institute who would like to answer this question so I will post to them also! It’s caused by a parasite that spends part of it’s life living in a mosquito gut and part of it in the human liver! It bursts out of the liver in huge numbers and infects red blood cells. A new mosquito comes, drinks your blood and sucks up the parasite which then lives in the mosquito gut for a while. It moves to the mosquito salivary gland and from there gets injected into the next human that’s bitten. The parasite quickly finds the liver where it lives for a while before the whole process starts again.