Francois Nosten on Fever Pitch podcast, on a collapsing border where medicine meets war

Professor Francois Nosten, Director of MORU's Shoklo Malaria Research Unit (SMRU), reflects on the decades he’s spent on the border between Thailand and Myanmar, a place of relentless upheaval and quiet endurance. From the 1980s onward, he has lived amid war, displacement, and disease, building a fragile bridge between science and survival. He characterizes the border as a wound that never quite closes – people cross not for opportunity but to escape a state that devours its own. What he describes is not steady progress but a cycle of collapse and recovery, every advance shadowed by the return of violence and the onset of disease.