**1. Introduction**

The main impetus for trying to understand immunity to malaria is the need to develop effective malaria vaccines. Despite years of knowing that humans can be immune to malaria the mechanisms underlying this immunity are yet to be properly understood. This is, in part, attributable to the complexity of the malaria parasite and its life cycle resulting in a complex parasite-host relation. The outcome of a malaria infection is a consequence of interactions between host, parasite and environmental factors. As such attempts to correlate outcome with a single immunological parameter often results in spurious associations that do not hold in different circumstances. This situation is exacerbated by the lack of natural animal models for human malaria from which observations could reliably be extrapolated. Consequently, much of our understanding of malaria immunity is based on extrapolation of in vitro observations or deduced from phenomenological observations.

As is the case with immunity to other infections, immunity to malaria is the result of a combination of genetic resistance, non-adaptive immunity, and acquired or adaptive immunity. This chapter will mainly focus on immunity to *Plasmodium falciparum* malaria because it accounts for largest proportion of disease and practically all malaria mortality.
