It’s an entirely preventable disease, and when diagnosed early, it’s easily treatable. Yet Malaria still claims hundreds of thousands of lives each year.
All it takes is a single mosquito bite and you can become infected. In 2012, the tropical disease caused 627,000 deaths internationally, 90% of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Ashley Uys, a South African biotechnologist-turned-enterpreneur, is hoping to bring that number down to zero.
Through his company Medical Diagnostic, Uys has developed a self-testing kit that can diagnose the disease in less than 30 minutes, and put sufferers on the path to recovery faster.
“I decided to look at what is the most needing product in Africa at the moment. And malaria, malaria is big,” says Uys.
