by Ron Marchand
On November 13, 2024, entomologist Dr. Nguyen Tuyen Quang passed away. From 1993 onwards he led a team of Vietnamese researchers for more than twenty years at the malaria field station established by MCNV in Khánh Phú, a village in the mountains 30 kilometers inland from Nha Trang, south central Vietnam.
Dr.Nguyen Tuyen Quang (left) and his colleagues work in a field station in Khanh Phu commune.
MCNV supported the Vietnamese malaria institutes at that time to see whether insecticide-treated mosquito nets would be a good alternative to DDT in the fight against malaria. The old-fashioned spraying of the walls in houses with DDT no longer worked well and purchasing the product abroad became too expensive.
Khánh Phú was one of the most malaria endemic places in Vietnam and the project studied all aspects of the epidemiology (human behaviour, mosquitoes, parasites and the environment) in great detail. Among other things, to find out whether the introduction of mosquito nets would not be counterproductive due to the loss of natural immunity build-up during childhood. In 1998, five years after the start of the study, malaria in the village had decreased by 80% and the people became healthier. However, it did not work against a malaria mosquito that lives deeper in the forest, a situation that was studied in depth by Quang and his colleagues from 2000 onwards to improve the situation further.
Numbers and measurements were sacred
Quang was chosen as team leader by his boss at the malaria institute, Dr. Nguyen Tho Vien, who, next to me, was the spiritual father of the project. This was a logical choice because Quang was one of the few who also spoke English, could write reports, but above all because he was very dedicated and good in data analysis. For both Vien and Quang, numbers and measurements were sacred – even if these were difficult to explain or contradicted expectations.
I remember the collaboration with Quang as special. We could spend days (sometimes nights) talking about malaria research, during which I learned a lot from him about the specific problems in Vietnam. The management of the Khanh Phu the project was a bit exceptional: everyone in the team could think along and participate in decision-making. Very different from the usual top-down approach in which ‘a boss decides everything and sends his soldiers into the field to do the hard work without getting credit for it’. Quang could identify well with the participatory MCNV approach and helped me to find the right balance to keep the team’s freedom while preserving the goodwill of far-away directors.
Ron Marchand worked for MCNV from 1990 – 2016
