Question: what disise do you study more?

Nicola Wardrop answered on 10 Mar 2013:

Up till last year I worked mainly on a disease called sleeping sickness – it’s caused by a parasite which is passed on to humans by a tsetse fly (quite a big biting fly) in Africa. If you don’t treat it, it is deadly, but even the drugs used to treat it are pretty bad – one of them is made of arsenic and kills about 5% of the people they treat with it. Luckily it is not a very common disease and the number of people infected with it is going down every year.

At the moment I am working on more of a mix of diseases. Scrub typhus (this is transmitted by little flea like creatures), malaria (spread by mosquitoes) and some others which can spread from cows to people – things like worms (yuck!), bovine TB, rift valley fever (another one spread by mosquitoes). I am still at the start of my current research project, so I don’t know yet which of the diseases I will look at more, but they are all really interesting in their own ways!