David Warrell is now Emeritus Professor of Tropical Medicine and Honorary Fellow of StCross College at the University of Oxford, UK. After training at Oxford, St Thomas’s Hospital and the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, London, UK, he has lived and worked as a physician, teacher, researcher and expedition doctor in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanzania, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. He is senior editor of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine and Essential Malariology and the Oxford Handbook of Expedition and Wilderness Medicine and has published more than 400 research papers and textbook chapters on malaria, rabies, relapsing fevers and other infectious and tropical diseases, comparative respiratory physiology, respiratory diseases, herpetology, venomous animals, envenoming and plant and chemical poisoning. He is a consultant to the World Health Organization (on malaria, rabies, snake bites, antivenom production), British Army, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Medical Research Council, Royal Geographical Society, Zoological Society of London and Earth Watch International. He is a past President of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and International Federation for Tropical Medicine and Honorary Fellow of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Ceylon College of Physicians.