AFRICAN INVENTORS: The $.30 Kit That Could End Malaria

November 13, 2014 - SOUTH AFRICA - It's an entirely preventable disease, and when diagnosed early, it's easily treatable. Yet Malaria still claims hundreds of thousands of lives each year.

All it takes is a single mosquito bite and you can become infected. In 2012, the tropical disease caused 627,000 deaths internationally, 90% of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Ashley Uys, a South African biotechnologist-turned-enterpreneur, is hoping to bring that number down to zero.

Through his company Medical Diagnostic, Uys has developed a self-testing kit that can diagnose the disease in less than 30 minutes, and put sufferers on the path to recovery faster.

"I decided to look at what is the most needing product in Africa at the moment. And malaria, malaria is big," says Uys.

"I then decided to look at a malaria test that can actually show you the strain of malaria you have -- the type of malaria -- so (doctors) know which treatment to give you, and then also to see if the treatment is working or not. So I developed a test that can do all of that."

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If Africans are not careful, their predicted future wealth will fall into foreign hands - as has happened in the past, writes Khaya Dlanga.

NOWADAYS it seems that Africa is hit with a new crisis every few months. Looking back on this year alone we have had the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the Boko Haram kidnappings in Nigeria, and increased Al-Shaabab terrorist activity in East Africa to name a few.

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African Unity: Just Out of Reach?

There is a tendency to see the entire continent of Africa—which is made up of 54 separate nations and encompasses nearly 20 percent of Earth’s total land—as one gigantic country. The approach of merging the continent’s unique landscapes, divergent cultures, and peoples who speak over 1,000 languages makes it difficult to fully appreciate its variety. Yet some are trying hard to change this view.

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World Economy: Capitalism lurches from one crisis to another ;

Despite vast amounts of imperial data to the contrary, the great majority of writers on imperialism continue to describe and analyze US imperialism strictly in economic terms, as an expansion of “capital accumulation”, “accumulation on a world scale”. In fact the major and minor US imperial wars have more to do with “capital dis-accumulation”, in the sense that trillion dollar flows have gone out from the US, hundreds of billions of dollars in profits from resource sites have been undermined, markets for exports have been severely weakened and exploitable productive labor has been uprooted.nbsp;

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