In June 2017, Betty Balikagala traveled to a hospital in Gulu District, in northern Uganda. It was the rainy season: a peak time for malaria transmission. Balikagala, a researcher at Juntendo University in Japan, was back in her home country to hunt for mutations in the parasite that causes the disease.
For about four weeks, Balikagala and her colleagues collected blood from infected patients as they were treated with a powerful cocktail of antimalarial drugs. After initial analysis, the team then shipped their samples — glass slides smeared with blood, and filter papers with blood spots — back to Japan.
