Embarking on a trip to Zimbabwe? You might want to check HealthMap.org, a site that tracks disease pathogens on an international scale, first. A detailed and easy-to-use map designed for the average user to find outbreaks by country and region (although it is also used by local public health officials and clinics), HealthMap started as a disease tracking project about two years ago, but has recently started attracting attention as a top public source of disease information.

What makes a disease deadly in the twenty-first century? Medicine has never been more advanced; our understanding of spread and infection, never more sophisticated. And yet, we may be poised for the largest and most devastating pandemic the human race has ever encountered.

With Big Pharma spending upward of $1 billion to bring a single drug to pharmacy shelves, its little wonder that unprofitable afflictions like malaria and African sleeping sickness go largely ignored. Curtis Chong witnessed this neglect firsthand in 2001 as a third-year medical student working in an emergency room in Mozambique. Day and night, malaria patients lined up for treatment, but Chongs medication stockpile was often too low or too antiquated to treat drug-resistant strains of the disease, and people were dying.

Six years later, the 31-year-old pharmacologist is spearheading an innovative way to bring better drugs, and more of them, to the developing world.