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The Journal of the Royal Institute of Thailand Volume III - 2011 151 Sasithon Pukrittayakamee, Arjen Dondorp the blood-feeding female Anopheles mosquito hosts. The earliest documented mosquito fossil is dated some 30-65 million years ago, but it is thought that their origin goes even further back to the Jurassic era 135 million years ago. Records of malaria-like infection in humans is as old as the earliest known scriptures about 6,000 years ago. Sumerian and Egyptian texts dating from 3,500 to 4,000 years ago mention about fevers and splenomegaly suggestive of malaria and splenomegaly in Egyptian mummies is believed to have been caused by malaria. After having caused millennia of devastation, the first global malaria eradication campaign began after the Second World War. In 1957 AD more than 130 countries underwrote the call by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate malaria infection from the Earth. The effort was supported by a potent new insecticidal dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) developed in 1939 AD, which was tested with great success during World War II to control malaria and typhus among civilians and military troops. After important initial successes, the global malaria eradication campaign eventually failed and was officially ended in 1969. Development of DDT resistance in mosquito species and chloroquine resistance in P. falciparum, the most fatal human malaria parasite, are considered important contributors to this failure. Recently in 2007 a renewed malaria eradication plan was promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Malaria Burden At present, malaria remains as the most important parasitic infection of mankind. Each year, 300-500 million of the worldûs populations are infected and around one million people die from malaria infection. The last decade has seen some success in reducing the burden of malaria is both Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, mainly through widespread deployment of insecticide treated bed nets and artemisinin-based combination therapy (Charunwatthana & Pukrittayakamee, 2010). But the development of drug resistance in falciparum and vivax malaria, the two most important species infecting humans, is always lingering and threatens to annihilate these recent achievements to reduce the massive burden of morbidity and mortality from malaria (Figure 1, WHO, 2010). The malaria parasite has proven an evolutionally very successful survivor in the worldûs biological history. The prevention and treatment of malaria have been investigated for over a thousand years. Despite their long history of discovery and development, antimalarial 150-159_mac9 4/26/12, 9:20 PM 151