• Question: What inspired you to help make new drugs for the nasty tropical disease and what would it mean to you if you had successful results?

    Asked by Caitlinr to Hannah on 4 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Hannah Bolt

      Hannah Bolt answered on 4 Nov 2016:

      Hi Caitlinr,

      Thanks for your question 🙂 I wanted to make new drugs for leishmaniasis (the nasty tropical disease) because it has such nasty symptoms. If you want to see what the disease looks like Google leishmaniasis and you will see photos of the skin infections it causes (they are pretty horrible, so I wouldn’t recommend looking at them before dinner though!). Each year there are around one million new cases of the disease across the world and it kills around 30,000 people – to me this is really scary and I wanted to help if I could. The disease itself is also really interesting as it’s caused by parasites so this helped to inspire me to study it more.

      I work with a good team of other scientists on my project and we all work pretty hard, so if we have successful results it would be really satisfying and could help lots of people across the world that have the disease 🙂

      Hannah

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