Medicine without Frontiers: An Oxford physician-scientist working in Kenya.

On one of Kevin Marsh's regular visits to Oxford, the historian Conrad Keating caught up with the world-renowned malariologist and asked him what initially drew him to tropical medicine... Africa is the world's most malarious continent, and the east coast of Kenya has been particularly debilitated by the disease. In 1987 Kevin Marsh visited the area and recognised that the region offered great possibilities for an integrated programme of research on malaria that linked basic scientific, clinical and epidemiological approaches. In collaboration with the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) and Oxford University, and supported by the Wellcome Trust, a small, dedicated team began work in 1989. From modest beginnings in Kilifi, the Wellcome Research Programme has grown under Kevin Marsh's direction to become the most prestigious research programme in Africa. Its state-of-the-art laboratory houses 800 staff who produce over 100 peer review papers a year, working on major causes of ill health in Kenya and other countries in east Africa. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Om Podcasten

Every year more than 10 million children under the age of five die in developing countries, nearly a million from malaria alone. Every day more than 2500 people die of malaria, most of them children. These are the statistics that help drive the tenacious work of Oxford researchers in tropical medicine. The genesis of Oxford’s involvement goes back to a conversation over a bottle of whiskey, between David Weatherall and Peter Williams, the then Director of the Wellcome Trust, in New York in 1977. This led to David Warrell establishing the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok and Weatherall, in the words of Peter Williams, became the “Fairy God Mother” of the Oxford researchers who went to work in the tropics. Today Oxford medicine has a presence in India, China, South East Asia, Africa and South America. It is one Oxford University’s major contemporary achievements and it has given the university a global presence.