World Malaria Day 2015: play a game and save a life
Image credit: CDC/ James Gathany
IN 2013, my colleague and I attended an ISNTD meeting (The International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases) in London where we heard about an innovative approach to expand rapid diagnosis of malaria by crowdsourcing volunteer help. Volunteers played an online game, and we wrote about it in Helping the Crowd Fight Malaria.
Two years later this game, has hunted down over 722,000 parasites.
The MalariaSpot online game takes just one minute and works by getting you to analyse real blood samples. Tap the parasites but don't let the leucocytes mislead you!
Why you should play? A single diagnosis can take up to 30 minutes of a specialist's time, as they manually look for parasites in the blood with a microscope - up to 100 images have to be visually checked by a specialist. There aren’t enough in the world to deal with the 200 million people infected each year.
Crowdsourcing malaria parasite quantification could be a scalable, fast, ubiquitous and accurate screening system, essential for malaria eradication.
Take part for World Malaria Day 25th April
ISNTD are calling for more gamers to take part this weekend (it is after all world malaria day on Saturday 25th April).
Just follow this link, enjoy yourself, [free apps for android and iphone/ipad] and help others:
To find out more about the founder and the game you can view a video of his 2013 presentation here: Dr. Miguel Luengo-Oroz
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