Fischer, professor of medicine at WashU Medicine, heads the school’s Death to Onchocerciasis and Lymphatic Filariasis Project (DOLF). The program’s dramatic name feels appropriate given the audaciousness of its goal: the complete elimination of two devastating parasitic diseases. Lymphatic filariasis (LF, known as elephantiasis) and onchocerciasis (oncho, known as river blindness) cause illness and disability, affecting millions in tropical and subtropical regions of the world.
Thanks in part to DOLF-led research, progress has been tangible, though slower than initially hoped when the project launched in 2010 with funding from the Gates Foundation. A World Health Organization (WHO) target to eliminate LF by 2020 has come and gone.
“No new clinical cases have occurred in the last decade, but my impression doesn’t count for much. We need hard data to really show the absence of infection.”Peter Fischer
Yet on Alor, Fischer and his collaborators see a welcome instance of hope and likely success. Following the mass distribution of medication in the mid-2000s, multiple research visits to the island point to the absence of Brugia timori, one of the three types of thread-like worms that cause LF.
“No new clinical cases have occurred in the last decade,” Fischer says, “but my impression doesn’t count for much. We need hard data to really show the absence of infection.”
In summer 2025, the researchers returned to the island with a single-minded question: Is B. timori gone for good?