In November of 2011 my Dad, Venkatesh Karuparthy (MD), came across a Wall Street Journal article about two books about malaria: Sonia Shah's The Fever and Bill Shore's The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men. Malaria snuck into my Dad's life again as he was on the phone talking to one of his friends in India who is a neurosurgeon. His friend was telling him how there were multiple patients coming in with cerebral malaria. After this, my Dad started to hear more anecdotal case series about visitors to a particular area contracting a fatal form of cerebral malaria. Where was all this happening? A tribal area near Rampachodavaram, which is located in the East Godavari district of Andhra  Pradesh, India. With all of this, my Dad started to get interested in malaria because of its complex life cycle and fascinating history.

 

His passion spilled over onto my sister, Rekha, and myself after he recommended we read both of the books. I didn't think that I would enjoy either, but to my surprise, they were quite interesting. (I definitely recommend them both!) 

 

The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men centers around Steven Hoffman and his journey of founding Sanaria Inc., a biotechnology company situated in Maryland in which he has conjured a potential vaccine to cure malaria. My dad, sister, and I visited Sanaria Inc. in March of 2012 to learn more about the center. We toured the facility, but were unable to meet Hoffman as he was at the time out of the country working on the first clinical trials of the vaccine.

 

Shortly after visiting Sanaria, the discussion of actually making a trip out to India that summer surfaced. 

 

Summer of 2012:

Soon the plane tickets were bought and my Dad and I left for India not at all knowing what to expect. The mission in the summer of 2012 consisted of studying the current situation in the tribal area of Rampachodavaram firsthand. After talking with Government officials, health officials, and the tribals themselves, a conclusion was formed. There were three main factors contributing to the high occurance of malaria:

 

 

 

-Communication: There is a lack of communication and coordination between the public and private interest organizations.

 

-Infrastructure: In developing countries this is a prevalent problem. The primitive lifestyle creates places for stagnant water to collect where mosquitos can easily breed.

 

-Culture: The habits of the tribals foster a culture which is ideal for the mosquito. For example, after a long day of working in the fields, many of the men will drink alcohol brewed from the sap of the indigenous trees. They will drink and then fall asleep in the woods, making them an open target for infected mosquitos to feed off of.

 

 

 

Underlying these three is the lack of education. There are many misconceptions throughout the tribal area. For example, some people thought that you could get infected by Malaria by drinking water.

 

Our team wrote an abstract of the findings, and it was accepted as a poster presentation at the Challenges in Malaria Research Conference held in Basel, Switzerland. Steven Hoffman was actually a keynote speaker at the conference, so I was very excited to finally meet him. 

 

Then in September of 2012, my Dad and I were able to visit Wartburg College in Iowa where Sonia Shah, author of The Fever, spoke. I was very humbled to be able to meet an inspiration that had fueled the events of that past summer. 

 

Summer of 2013:

Finding that lack of education was a large problem, the following summer we returned and hosted 2 educational workshop, one for tribal high school aged students and another for tribal nurses. Our workshop had the following components: an informational video about malaria dubbed into the native language, an informational PowerPoint presentation, a Q&A session, and a hands on activity where we made homemade mosquito traps using materials found in the tribal area. Following this summer, we presented our project in a poster presentation at the Joint International Tropical Medicine Meeting in Bangkok, Thailand (Dec 2013). 

 

Summer of 2014:

Rekha wrote and submitted an essay discussing the relationship between health and food productivity for the World Food Prize, which is a prestigious award that recognizes the importance of establishing a sustainable world food supply. Along with 80 other participants, she presented her essay and research at the World Food Prize event in October in Des Moines, Iowa.

 

With its headquarters in Moline, Illinois, John Deere is a world-renowned corporation involved in manufacturing agricultural machinery and supporting farmers across the world. The malaria team has talked directly with the John Deere Foundation, the company’s charitable organization, in hopes of learning and helping the organization with their future endeavors and guidance in our own project’s future. With two-thirds of India involved in agriculture, we decided to define the connection between health and food productivity in the East Godavari District of India. The malaria team surveyed over 100 tribal farmers from a first hand perspective to fully understand the complications that arise with disease and food productivity.