05/01/2026
Professor François Nosten, Director of MORU's Shoklo Malaria Research Unit (SMRU), reflects on the decades he's spent on the border between Thailand and Myanmar, a place of relentless upheaval and quiet endurance. From the 1980s onward, he has lived amid war, displacement, and disease, building a fragile bridge between science and survival. He characterizes the border as a wound that never quite closes – people cross not for opportunity but to escape a state that devours its own. What he describes is not steady progress but a cycle of collapse and recovery, every advance shadowed by the return of violence and the onset of disease.
For decades, Dr. François Nosten has lived and worked on the Thailand–Myanmar frontier, a place shaped by war, displacement, and disease. He first entered refugee camps in the 1980s and saw malaria everywhere: fast, unforgiving, and often fatal for pregnant women and children. Waiting to “see tomorrow” wasn’t an option.
That relentless urgency pushed him from emergency care into research, helping build the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit: part field hospital, part laboratory, built to survive floods, mosquitoes, and conflict. The work helped transform malaria treatment worldwide and drove real progress along the border. Deaths fell sharply. For a moment, elimination felt possible.
But malaria adapts. Vivax became the dominant strain here: slower, recurring, and quietly draining lives. The cure exists, yet access is trapped by poverty, logistics, and the need for testing many clinics can’t afford.
After the 2021 coup, Myanmar’s health systems fractured again. Clinics shuttered. Roads turned dangerous. Programs for malaria, HIV, and TB broke apart. Nosten warns tuberculosis, already the world’s deadliest infectious disease, can surge when funding and access collapse.
And today, new risks have grown in the vacuum: vast scam compounds along the border, holding tens of thousands in brutal conditions, environments that can accelerate TB, HIV, and COVID threats.
This episode is a clear-eyed look at what global health truly depends on: stability, access, and sustained support because when those fail, disease rushes in.
Listen here: https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2025/12/18/episode-452-fever-pitch
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