Circle of Life
It’s time to pull out your investigative skills and put on your detective hat!
This challenge is all about searching, identifying and assessing information.
There is lots of information out there about the essential medicines, but it is scattered around, hard to find and sometime unreliable.
We’ve created this challenge to investigate the history and many life events of the essential medicines, which together will help us understand the “how” and “why” of their global accessibility. In this challenge you’ll be tasked with with choosing an essential medicine, searching for its important life events which together will form their Circle of Life.
If it is your first time taking one of our challenges, you’ll need to register. Once you’ve registered, you’ll be sent a personal code via email that you can use to access all the challenges.
About the Circle of Life
Circle of Life invites you to a mission in the pursuit of information about the history of essential medicines.
Think of the Circle Of Life as a 'family tree' that details all the important life events for an essential medicine. This may include the medicine's names, dates of birth, ownerships and general history. Each medicine has a unique history and life span, some may have lived a quiet life while others will have a very extensive history full of mergers, acquisitions and name changes. Together, this information will help us to understand why and how the accessibility of some of the essential medicines has changed over time.
We’re starting with the antimalarial essential medicines. These are used to treat or prevent malaria, a parasitic infection that is transmitted by mosquitoes. In 2018, the World Health Organisation reported that there was an estimated 228 million cases of malaria world wide and that it was responsible for approximately 405,000 deaths.
Need some help getting started?
Check out what information is already stored on your chosen antimalarial essential medicine in our open access database
Read our blog - Cycloserine is available, but is it accessible? which is all about the process of constructing the Circle of Life for the essential medicine cycloserine.
