Mosquitoes have been around for 100 million years.
The animal that kills the most people may well surprise you. Forget lions, snakes, spiders, bees or dogs. The animal widely regarded as killing the most people in modern history is the mosquito (Spanish for ‘little fly’).
Mosquitoes kill more than a million people a year and are known to spread diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, encephalitis, and dengue fever. Most deaths are the result of malaria. The World Health Organisation claims that between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria occur each year, and a child dies from malaria every 30 seconds.
Malaria is spread by hungry female mosquitoes carrying the malaria parasite Plasmodium in their guts. When the mosquito bites a human it injects into the body saliva containing the parasite. The parasite enters the blood stream, makes its way to the liver and gets down to multiplying. From there the parasites leave the liver and infect red blood cells, which are then destroyed. Blood vessels in the brain and lungs are also affected, leading to low oxygen levels and often coma followed by death.
Anti-malarial drugs exist, but there’s currently no malaria vaccine.
Short answer: The mosquito kills the most people. The majority of deaths occur in Africa. Scientists are currently working on a vaccine to defeat the malaria parasite.
