Tu Youyou grew up in Ningbo but left for Beijing to study in a university in the 1950s. (Photo : Reuters)
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and a cash prize of nearly $1 million are shared by three scientists for their efforts in battling parasitic diseases.
The international recognition will be bestowed to Chinese pharmacologist Tu Youyou, 84; Japanese microbiologist Satoshi Omura, 80; and Massachusetts-based Irish parasitologist William C. Campbell, 85.
They will likewise share the 8 million Swedish crowns ($960,000) that comes with the award.
Tu discovered artemisinin, a drug used to treat life-threatening malaria.
Malaria, an infectious tropical disease, is caused by plasmodium parasites. Female mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles, simply referred to as malaria mosquitoes, get to spread the disease through their bites.
A person usually catches fever and experiences chills and sweating a few weeks after getting bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito.
“Malaria causes about 198 million illnesses and an estimated 584,000 deaths each year,” says the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on its website.
Tu, who has been a researcher at the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (CACMS) in Beijing since 1965, discovered that a traditional Chinese remedy derived from sweet wormwood can decrease the number of malaria parasites present in the blood, according to USAID.
Campbell and Omura, after working together, discovered avermectin that cures lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis.
Avermectin kills parasitic roundworms.
Like malaria, lymphatic filariasis, also referred to as elephantiasis, is a mosquito-borne disease. Nematodes or parasitic worms of the Filarioidea type cause this tropical disease, which the World Health Organization (WHO) described as something “neglected.”
An infected person can have “elephant’s legs.” The legs swell and their skin thickens.
The WHO said that there are more than 120 million suffering from elephantiasis. The disease has so far disfigured and incapacitated 40 million people.
Onchocerciasis, also called Robles disease and more commonly known as river blindness, is transmitted by a black fly of the Simulium type, which thrives near rivers.
The parasitic worm Onchocerca volvulus causes river blindness.
The Nobel Prize Award Ceremony will be held on Dec. 10 at the Stockholm Concert Hall in Sweden.
King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden will confer the Prize in Economic Sciences and the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Literature, Physics and Physiology, according to the official website of the Nobel Prize.
