Doctors Without Borders Is Experimenting With Delivery Drones To Battle An Epidemic

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Drones aren’t delivering pizza just yet. But they could soon help save lives in places where health care is hard to reach.

It’s going to be a while before Amazon’s drones are delivering Christmas presents to anyone’s doorstep. But in the remote forests of Papua New Guinea, one startup’s vision for delivery drones is already coming to life.

In September, executives of Matternet, a Silicon Valley drone startup, traveled to the Pacific Island nation at the invitation of the government and Doctors Without Borders staff, who are helping battle a serious tuberculosis epidemic in the rural regions of the country.

“We’re working in one of the biggest swamps in the world,” says Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, in French) program manager Eric Pujo. “It is a very challenging environment, and to run a good tuberculosis project, one of the key points is diagnostic. The earlier you can put a patient under treatment, the more likely you’ll stop it from spreading,” he says.

The trouble for the doctors is transporting patients’ samples, which need to be analyzed quickly for an accurate diagnosis. In the Kerema district, the samples must travel from clinics to a central hospital that is anywhere from 15 to 85 miles away. Roads are either barely passable due to the mud or don’t exist at all. Planes, boats, and walking make for an unpredictable journey that can take a few hours or a few days. Pujo, who had heard a presentation given by Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos, got in touch with the company when he realized that low-cost drones could be an ideal alternative.

The pilot project is an early test for Matternet, a Palo Alto, California, company that aims to build drone transportation networks in world regions with limited or poor roads. In August, the company worked with the World Health Organization to complete another pilot test in the high mountains of Bhutan. Raptopoulos believes drones can allow developing nations to “leapfrog” in transportation and shipping, just as they have in the realm of communications, where the rise of cheaper mobile devices minimized the need to build expensive landline infrastructure.

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