“Surely there is no malaria here?” This is the typical response of fellow Bangkok residents when I tell them what my research focusses on. Therein lies the malaria paradox: the action gets exciting where the disease is on the verge of being wiped out. So, while hundreds of thousands of African children die of the disease yearly, we focus our attention obsessively on Southeast Asian countries where it is sometimes hard to find enough clinical cases to complete studies.