Prof. Nicholas White
Professor Nicholas White has lived and worked for more than half of his life in Thailand, when he arrived in Thailand in 1980 drug resistant malaria was a significant health problem in Thailand, but with advances in treatment and improved public health, malaria has been driven out to the border areas. The greatest advance in the treatment of malaria was the introduction of a traditional plant derived medicine from China; qinghaosu or artemisinin. Studies conducted here in Thailand, in adjacent countries, and later throughout the malaria affected world, established this as the most rapidly and reliably effective medicine for malaria. Today artemisinin combination treatment is recommended by the World Health Organisation as the treatment of choice for malaria everywhere in the world. Artesunate (an artemisinin derivative) has been shown to reduce the mortality of severe malaria by one third. A few years ago malaria was killing three thousand people each day, most of these preventable deaths were children in Africa. This number is falling but the toll is still enormous, and we have a long hard road ahead of us in our quest to eliminate malaria from the world. Thailand has been one of the leading countries conducting research on malaria and he is very privileged to have played a small part in this continuing effort. Much still remains to be done. Prof White has received the Prince Mahidol award in 2011 which is the highest academic recognition in this country. As a physician and Professor of Tropical Medicine at Mahidol University there is no greater honour than to receive the Prince Mahidol Award, an award bestowed in honour of the Father of Modern Medicine and Public Health in Thailand.
Professor Nicholas White is currently a Professor of Tropical Medicine at the Faculty of Tropical Medicine, Mahidol University and Oxford University, and is also a Consultant Physician at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK. Professor White chairs the Wellcome Trust Tropical Medicine Research Programme in South-East Asia, and the Oxford Tropical Medicine Network (encompassing research groups in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Kenya and The Gambia). He also currently co-chairs the World Health Organisation antimalarial treatment guidelines committee and the WHO Global Malaria Programme case management cluster. His principal research interests are malaria, particularly the pathophysiology and treatment of malaria, and also other severe tropical infectious diseases (melioidosis, typhoid, pyogenic, tuberculous and fungal meningitis, dengue, viral encephalitis, pneumococcal infections, diphtheria, and tetanus). He is currently on the Editorial or Advisory Boards of 13 scientific journals including The Lancet, PLOS Medicine, the European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology and Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. He has published over 880 scientific papers and over 40 book chapters.