I have an app on my phone that shows me news headlines from all the major newspapers each day.  Sometimes at night, when I’m in bed waiting to go to sleep, I check to see what’s happening out there in the world.  Last night I found this article and it kept me awake a long time.  I was fascinated by the work this Dr. Adrian Hill is doing at Oxford.  This is HUGE.  This is amazingly wonderful.

I’ve had malaria.  I spent 4 years living in South Africa and West Africa.  I faithfully took malaria medication to keep my body safe.  But I was bit by a mosquito who had developed an immunity to the Chloroquine I was taking.  I spent a few weeks in bed, with horrible fever and chills and wild dreams.  I became anemic and weak.  I lost weight.  As soon as my strength returned a bit, it hit me a second time and I was down again.  I understand something about malaria.  I have felt it suck the strength out of my body and I have seen it attack the lives of many of my friends and loved ones.

Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year.  I read this in the article last night:

Hill’s desire to eliminate malaria is an ambitious goal. The parasite behind the disease — Plasmodium falciparum — infected 214 million people in 2015, and caused more than 430,000 deaths.  “[If we] compare this with Ebola … the same year we had almost 500,000 malaria deaths … if malaria was new and suddenly killing half a million people on the continent and hadn’t been doing that before there would be a global panic,” says Hill.

I applaud the work on this Doctor Hill and his team.  I hope he finds success in helping to eradicate this deadly disease.  I will be cheering him on from here.

You can read the full article here:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/01/health/cnn-frontiers-adrian-hill-malaria-vaccine/index.html