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Although the Wang Pha clinic was established to treat malaria, it hasn't had a malaria case at all in several days. Now, patients come with other ailments or to visit the maternity ward. "When no one is worried, that's when we have to worry," said professor Francois Nosten, director of the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit, which includes Wang Pha and four other clinics along the Thai-Myanmar border.

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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.