The Savvy Plan to Combat Malaria With Mobile Phones

Esther Havens/Malaria No More

Martin Edlund likes to say that malaria may one day be the first disease beaten by mobile phones. Yes, he happens to be the CEO of the non-profit Malaria No More, so he has to say stuff like that. But no, it’s not a total pipedream.

Africa, where malaria kills around 400,000 children every year, is set to top 1 billion mobile phone subscriptions by next year. That means that public health researchers will have one billion ways to communicate with—and collect data from—the people who are most at risk of catching malaria, a disease that has traditionally been extremely difficult to track.

“Lack of information and data is why this is among one of the deadliest diseases on the planet,” Edlund says. And he believes mobile phones could change all that.

He’s not the only one. On Friday, Google.org, the search giant’s philanthropic arm, announced that it’s giving Malaria No More a $600,000 grant to embark on a potentially transformative data mining project in Nigeria. The grant is part of a pot of $15 million that Google.org is doling out to organizations that use technology to solve the world’s biggest problems.

For the Nigeria project, Malaria No More is partnering with a Nigerian startup called Sproxil, a company that spent the last five years combatting the massive counterfeit drug market in Nigeria by placing unique codes on authentic medications. Anyone who buys those medications can text the codes for free to Sproxil to verify the drugs. To date, Sproxil has verified some 13.4 million drugs and counting.

But this kind of verification has implications far beyond the massive problem of counterfeit drugs. By urging people living in often remote places to submit information about what medications they’re taking, this system can also give other organizations, like Malaria No More, a huge amount of data on where illnesses are occurring and how they’re being treated. In other words, if the project is successful, the codes could become a proxy for actual incidences of malaria.

“If we can show there’s a strong correlation, we can look at the drug reporting around the country where we don’t know what’s happening with malaria, and suddenly, we can tell what’s happening with malaria,” Edlund says.