Malaria is one of the deadliest infectious diseases on the planet. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2010, malaria caused an estimated 660 000 deaths, mostly among African children. That roughly translates into one child death every minute, or the same amount of time it will take you to read this post. Sadly, this does not need to happen: malaria is both preventable and curable.
There are several initiatives around the world to try to reduce malaria mortality, most notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Citizen scientists can also do their part by joining Go Fight Against Malaria, via the World Community Grid.
Participating couldn’t be easier: all you need to do is sign up, download the software, and select the projects you want to run. Then you let your computer do all the hard work.
The computer software will evaluate millions of candidate compounds against some 15 different molecular drug targets to discover new inhibitors that can block the activity of multi-drug-resistant mutant superbugs.
Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash