When Kayode Ojo first fell sick with malaria as a young boy in Nigeria, his grandfather shunned modern medicine, venturing into the bush to search for herbs and plants to treat the disease.
Having succumbed to malaria a further 50 or more times in his life, the United States-based scientist, now in his forties, is determined that his research - to develop a drug to stop transmission from humans back to mosquitoes - will help to eradicate the deadly disease.
“When people in Nigeria, the world’s hardest-hit country, get malaria, many simply shrug their shoulders and see it as normal ... that needs to change,” Ojo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a lab at the University of Washington in Seattle.
