Dr. Thomas (Tom) Churcher is a lecturer in Infectious Disease Dynamics at Imperial College London. He is an epidemiologist, entomologist and mathematical modeller working to understand the best way to eliminate malaria through targeting transmission.
From his time spent travelling through North and sub-Saharan Africa, Tom saw the devastation malaria caused on the continent- he also contracted the disease while in the Congo. Fascinated by the immense complexity of malaria and how it affected communities differently, Tom went on to study infectious diseases and find solutions to successfully eradicate this preventable and treatable disease.“The disease is horrendous, it kills hundreds of thousands of people each year."
Malaria is a disease that we know how to control. We have some really effective, cheap, easy to use interventions that we need to deploy at scale to really reduce the burden of this disease and eliminate malaria. We need to get these tools to people that need them and stop lives from being lost.
Science and innovation have powered progress towards a malaria-free world. We need people to have access to these tools to save lives and eliminate malaria for good.
Tom is proud to feature in the World Without Malaria campaign for Malaria Must Die, calling on people and leaders across the world to remain committed to ending malaria:
I work in malaria every day, I see how many people it affects, I see the dreadful public health impact it has, so when I had the opportunity to be a part of this campaign, I wanted to be involved. It is one of the world’s deadliest diseases, one of the worlds oldest diseases, it used to be in the UK, we managed to get rid of it. We now need to get rid of it in the world.
In action
