“She pulled out a big needle and in that moment May screamed like crazy, you should have seen it Grandma,” Ada said. I was in pain too just from seeing it. “ But you weren't even in the room, how could you tell the size of the needle?” May questioned. This shushed Ada and left May with a smug look. “Wait a minute, you mean I have not told you about Uganda’s Brian Gitta and his bloodless Malaria tests!!!” Grandma said. Talk about getting pain free check ups. Gitta must have thought about this when he and his friends created a device that can diagnose malaria in two minutes in 2013, using light and magnets with no need to draw blood. They called it Matibabu which means ‘health centre’ in Swahili.“I hated the needles and kept thinking of ways people could be diagnosed without pain,” Brian Gitta once said in an interview when asked why he created Matibabu.

“ But grandma he could have come up with a device for anything why malaria though?” Asked May. My dear if only more people to look Malaria seriously. Did you know that of the 247 million estimated cases of Malaria worldwide in 2021, as per the WHO report, 95% of those are from the African region. As if that's not bad enough, 80% of malaria deaths were children below the age of five. Who's doing the numbers though?

Must be a number of people for Brian Gitta was acclaimed for his work with a number of awards such as the UN Empowerment Award, the Aspirin Social Innovation award in addition to winning the Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation in 2018. So my dear, like Brian Gitta you too could make the world better if you put your mind to it. Like the old African proverb goes, “ If you think you are too small to make a difference you haven't spent a night with a mosquito.” Again with the mosquitoes grandma!!!!!