Check out this article published by the National Post. Follow the link to read the full story.
By Dr. James Aw
The line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” is better known than the circumstances that surround it. It may have been uttered by the American journalist Henry Stanley when he was in central Africa searching for the British explorer David Livingstone — who was there searching for the Nile’s source. What is less known is the fact Livingstone died of malaria 18 months after the 1871 meeting. Malaria had also taken his wife, Mary.
Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, that near the source of the Nile, a study is happening that could have major effects on the malady’s survival rates. Based out of Jinja Regional Referral Hospital in Uganda’s second-largest city, the study is being led by Dr. Kevin Kain of Toronto, who is the director of the Sandra A. Rotman Labs at the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health. A Canada Research Chair, Kain also happens to run the Travel Health Clinic at the Medcan Clinic.
In 1998, I myself visited Jinja to study tropical medicine. The area juxtaposed the familiar and the exotic. Minutes after dodging crocodiles on Lake Victoria in a wooden canoe, I’d be driving through a downtown plastered with Pepsi billboards. But a decade later, malaria remains a serious problem. More than 300 million people around the world are afflicted each year with the disease.
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