Dr. Debashish Das' story
Dr. Debashish Das' story
From an early age, Dr. Debashish Das knew he wanted to help people. He trained and graduated as a medical doctor in Bangladesh, where he found work in a clinic focusing on malaria. Dr. Debashish treated up to 150 malaria patients every day, including children with severe malaria. This is when he realised he wanted to dedicate his life to end this preventable and treatable disease.
Dr. Das is now a researcher at the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network, a global platform that provides research evidence to support international efforts to fight resistance to malaria medication. He holds a diploma in Tropical Medicine from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a Masters from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Santé Publique (EHESP) in France, and is currently pursuing his PhD at the University of Geneva. He has been involved in clinical research in various settings in Asia and Africa with the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
His research efforts focus on investigating antimalarial drug resistance and on finding treatment solutions for young children, who are at the highest risk. Antimalarial drug resistance has spread to many parts of Southeast Asia and it poses an increasing threat to the control and elimination of malaria globally.
Debashish recently became a father to a baby girl and it has had a huge impact on his personal and professional life.
Malaria must die to protect all our children’s future. Now more than ever I understand the importance of saving lives from malaria, which causes hundreds of thousands of deaths in children in developing countries every year.
Debashish knows that investment and collaboration are key factors to avoid the spread of antimalarial drug resistance and to achieve the global objective of beating this preventable disease: “If we don’t keep up the investment, we won’t hit the target.”
If there’s one single thing we can do to tackle drug resistance and eliminate malaria globally – it is collaboration – to maximise available resources and work together to provide the tools necessary to combat malaria. But not only top-down engagement, we need to work at a local level.
