On a blistering hot October day last year, the air thick with impending rain, Myaing Myaing Nyunt and I lurch in a wooden oxcart toward Sa-ka-pin, a small village in the rich agricultural lowlands about 20 kilometers northeast of Mandalay, Myanmar. We grip the splintery sides of the cart as the animals plunge chest deep in the muck; when they swish their tails, mud splatters everywhere. It’s 1 month before Myanmar’s historic election, and with us in the back is a young doctor with “NLD,” the initials of Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party, the National League for Democracy, shaved into his close-cropped hair. A second cart carrying township medical officers follows close behind. We stop at a wide, shallow river, where a man in a dugout canoe ferries us across. Two more carts are waiting for us.
Nyunt, a malariologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMD) in Baltimore, is visiting Sa-ka-pin to assess the extent of one of the biggest problems facing an ambitious campaign to wipe out malaria from the Mekong region (see feature story on How drug resistance triggers war to wipe out malaria in the Mekong region): the number of people infected with malaria who have no symptoms. It’s part of a unique collaboration led by Nyunt and her husband, molecular epidemiologist and malariologist Chris Plowe, who heads the Institute for Global Health at UMD. They are working with government scientists in Myanmar to forge the scientific and political links needed to drive malaria from her native country. The project has brought Nyunt back to Myanmar after more than a quarter-century of living abroad, much of it in exile. (Courtesy of sciencemag.org)
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