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Authors: Bill Shore
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diagnostic techniques, new kinds of sterilization and purification equipment, new preservation methodologies, and an entirely new field, that of synthetic biology.
But it is also leading to the creation of innovative new financing mechanisms, such as advanced market commitments
and philanthropic collaborations between governments and foundations, and has produced the first nonprofit pharmaceutical. It is even leading to new, clean energy sources.
As the modern-day equivalent of the space race, our global health challenges will transform the nonprofit and philanthropic universe in ways far greater than anything we might have anticipated, changing the way we approach a vast number of social problems.
In June 2004, Hoffman applied for one of the grants that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was making, especially designed for risk-taking projects aimed at making big breakthroughs—like solving the malaria vaccine issue. He did not get it.
CHAPTER 5
TROPICAL LINEAGE
A team of researchers in Costa Rica’s Alberto Manuel Brenes Reserve have been searching for plants that might help cure the mosquito-transmitted disease known as malaria. . . .
During their research, the team collected a total of 50 promising plants. . . . As of now, no other details have been released by the team as to why they think that these species . . . might cure (or help prevent?) malaria.
—Levi Novey, “Potential Cure for Malaria
Discovered in Rainforests of Costa Rica,”
EcoLocalizer, September 18, 2008
TROPICAL REGIONS ARE PARTICULARLY FERTILE areas for disease because of the many insects that breed and thrive there. Tropical medicine is the most dangerous and least lucrative of all medical practices. Patients live far away in jungles and near swamps. They are poorly educated, have little money for medical bills, no insurance, and barely enough food or water to survive. They are exposed
to horrific diseases that often have no cure, and of which most of us have never heard.
One of them is African trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness, which infects half a million people annually and kills 50,000. Visceral leishmaniasis, transmitted by sandflies, afflicts 1.5 million every year, giving them skin ulcers and potentially massive tissue destruction, and is 90 percent fatal if untreated. Chagas’ disease infects 16 million to 18 million people annually, mostly in Latin America. The parasite enters through broken skin, and there are often no symptoms for years, yet the disease invades organs and creates severe cardiac problems, claiming some 45,000 lives a year.
A magnified photo of just one of the parasites that teem within human hosts would deter most Americans from ever applying for a passport.
THE PRIESTHOOD OF TROPICAL MEDICINE
As Donald Burke, past president of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, explained at the centennial meeting of the organization in 2003:
It is no coincidence that our society was founded at the very moment when the USA first emerged as a global power. . . .
After the Spanish American War of 1898, the United States suddenly found itself with a string of new possessions that almost circled the globe in the tropics, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, and various
island territories in the Pacific Ocean. U.S. military personnel sent to occupy these new tropical possessions were decimated by infectious diseases. 1
Doctors who specialize in tropical medicine went through the same rigors of medical training and accumulated the same amount of medical-school debt as their colleagues who chose pediatrics, oncology, cardiology, or neurology. But when they chose different diseases, they chose different patients. As a result, they gave up the comforts of American medicine and many of its rewards.
The diseases that plague much of the world are neglected across the entire spectrum of American health care, from medical schools to research hospitals to global
But it is also leading to the creation of innovative new financing mechanisms, such as advanced market commitments
and philanthropic collaborations between governments and foundations, and has produced the first nonprofit pharmaceutical. It is even leading to new, clean energy sources.
As the modern-day equivalent of the space race, our global health challenges will transform the nonprofit and philanthropic universe in ways far greater than anything we might have anticipated, changing the way we approach a vast number of social problems.
In June 2004, Hoffman applied for one of the grants that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was making, especially designed for risk-taking projects aimed at making big breakthroughs—like solving the malaria vaccine issue. He did not get it.
CHAPTER 5
TROPICAL LINEAGE
A team of researchers in Costa Rica’s Alberto Manuel Brenes Reserve have been searching for plants that might help cure the mosquito-transmitted disease known as malaria. . . .
During their research, the team collected a total of 50 promising plants. . . . As of now, no other details have been released by the team as to why they think that these species . . . might cure (or help prevent?) malaria.
—Levi Novey, “Potential Cure for Malaria
Discovered in Rainforests of Costa Rica,”
EcoLocalizer, September 18, 2008
TROPICAL REGIONS ARE PARTICULARLY FERTILE areas for disease because of the many insects that breed and thrive there. Tropical medicine is the most dangerous and least lucrative of all medical practices. Patients live far away in jungles and near swamps. They are poorly educated, have little money for medical bills, no insurance, and barely enough food or water to survive. They are exposed
to horrific diseases that often have no cure, and of which most of us have never heard.
One of them is African trypanosomiasis, also known as sleeping sickness, which infects half a million people annually and kills 50,000. Visceral leishmaniasis, transmitted by sandflies, afflicts 1.5 million every year, giving them skin ulcers and potentially massive tissue destruction, and is 90 percent fatal if untreated. Chagas’ disease infects 16 million to 18 million people annually, mostly in Latin America. The parasite enters through broken skin, and there are often no symptoms for years, yet the disease invades organs and creates severe cardiac problems, claiming some 45,000 lives a year.
A magnified photo of just one of the parasites that teem within human hosts would deter most Americans from ever applying for a passport.
THE PRIESTHOOD OF TROPICAL MEDICINE
As Donald Burke, past president of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, explained at the centennial meeting of the organization in 2003:
It is no coincidence that our society was founded at the very moment when the USA first emerged as a global power. . . .
After the Spanish American War of 1898, the United States suddenly found itself with a string of new possessions that almost circled the globe in the tropics, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, and various
island territories in the Pacific Ocean. U.S. military personnel sent to occupy these new tropical possessions were decimated by infectious diseases. 1
Doctors who specialize in tropical medicine went through the same rigors of medical training and accumulated the same amount of medical-school debt as their colleagues who chose pediatrics, oncology, cardiology, or neurology. But when they chose different diseases, they chose different patients. As a result, they gave up the comforts of American medicine and many of its rewards.
The diseases that plague much of the world are neglected across the entire spectrum of American health care, from medical schools to research hospitals to global
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