It is agriculture that brought malaria with it

if humans had not abandoned their nomadic ways for agriculture, two important events would be missing from the history of civilization: deforestation and domestication of animals. Man would also not have heard of diseases like aids and swine flu.

In 2007, the World Health Organization put down the number of people killed by the aids virus to two million. The virus is said to have shifted to humans from chimpanzees when forests were cleared. The swine flu pandemic exemplifies the names livestock added to the list of transitioning pathogens.

Now the list is longer. The malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, that kills 1.5 to 2.7 million people each year, also came from wild chimpanzees say scientists.

Chimpanzees harbour the parasite Plasmodium reichenowi