Abstract
In 1911 the British medical doctor Ronald Ross, who had already received the 1902 Nobel prize for his work on malaria, studied a system of differential equations modelling the spread of this disease. He showed that malaria can persist only if the number of mosquitoes is above a certain threshold. Therefore it is not necessary to kill all mosquitoes to eradicate malaria – it is enough to kill just a certain fraction. Similar epidemic models were later developed by Kermack and McKendrick.
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Further reading
G.H.F.N.: Sir Ronald Ross, 1857–1932. Obit. Not. Fellows Roy. Soc. 1, 108–115 (1933)
Ross, R.: The Prevention of Malaria, 1st edn. John Murray, London (1910). www.archive.org
Ross, R.: The Prevention of Malaria, 2nd edn. John Murray, London (1911)
Ross, R.: Memoirs with a Full Account of the Great Malaria Problem and its Solution. John Murray, London (1923). www.archive.org
Rowland, J.: The Mosquito Man, The Story of Sir Ronald Ross. Roy Publishers, New York (1958)
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Bacaër, N. (2011). Ross and malaria (1911). In: A Short History of Mathematical Population Dynamics. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-115-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-85729-115-8_12
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