New Scientist Australian Edition – 24 August 2019

46 | New Scientist | 24 August 2019

Without

a drop

of blood

Malaria is a daily threat for

millions of people, one that

inspired Brian Gitta to create a

test that could change how we

treat the disease on a global scale,

as he tells Helen Thomson

Features Interview

A

9-YEAR-OLD child is locked between

his mother’s legs, refusing to have the

blood test that could save his life. That

is a regular sight at Brian Gitta’s nearest clinic

in Kampala, Uganda, where people wait for

hours in long queues to learn if they have

malaria, one of the leading causes of death

in the country.

Worldwide, 219 million people get malaria

each year and 435,000 people die of the

disease. More than 90 per cent of those

deaths are in Africa, according to the World

Health Organization.

We can treat malaria, but accurate

diagnosis is essential: the drugs targeting

the mosquito-borne parasite that causes the

disease can harm people who don’t have it.

Diagnostic tests take time and, worse still,

they are invasive. The most widely used

method involves analysing a blood sample

under a microscope, a process that can

take up to an hour. Rapid diagnostic tests

are becoming more widespread, but they

developments and skills that I’ve learned to

solve the problem of malaria?”

Why focus on malaria and not another disease?

Malaria is something that people where I live

are fighting every day. My friends and I all

experienced a lot of malaria growing up.

How many times have you had it?

I can’t even count how many times I had it as

a child; at least once a year. It’s tough – you’re

hospitalised, you’re throwing up, you’ve got a

high temperature, you can’t eat.

Is the situation still as bad?

Things have improved: we’ve got better

medication and free mosquito nets. But we

haven’t seen much change in the diagnosis.

I asked myself, “Why is it that people are still

dying when we have the medication? Why are

people still suffering, just to get a simple

diagnostic test done?” When I first started

looking into it, we didn’t really have an

still require people to give a blood sample.

Gitta thought there must be an easier way

and when he started studying at Makerere

University in Uganda 2012, he set out to find it.

Now he and his team are running a clinical trial

for a portable, non-invasive device that uses

light to identify malaria in the bloodstream in

just 2 minutes. He hopes it won’t only save

precious time for people with the disease, but

also help us to track malaria around the world.

Why did you take on such a huge problem?

Growing up in Uganda, I went to a traditional

primary school and got involved in a

computer club. I was 9 years old and I was

meant to be learning Microsoft Word, but

also ended up playing games. I liked it so

much, I kept wanting to come back and

complete the next level. I eventually became

head of the computing club at high school

and then went on to study computer science

at university. I was in my first year when I

thought, “how can I use all of these software