Photo by Safepoint Trust
By Shea Parton & Luke Warner
Earlier in the year we received an email from LifeSaver campaign founder Marc Koska OBE about a project he was involved with and the more we learned about his life and work, the more inspired we became.
Koska was born in Bournemouth, in the south of England, on the coast of the English Channel and went to Stowe boarding school in Buckingham. Instead of heading to university, he chose to work a variety of jobs and at the age of twenty-three he was living in the Caribbean, creating models for lawyers to use in courtroom re-enactments. While enjoying life in the Caribbean, he came across a newspaper article which predicted that the re-use of syringes would be a major transmission route of HIV in clinics in the developing world. This gave him a new purpose and a path to pursue which lead to a seventeen year career of inventing and distributing an auto-disable syringe incapable of re-use. In order for his idea to be viable and easily instituted internationally, it had to be competitively priced, it had to be created with existing machinery, and it had to be used in the same way as traditional models. The result of his efforts was the K1 auto-disable syringe.
So now, instead of kicking back like he did in his twenties, Koska travels the world, meeting with medical suppliers and national health ministers on behalf of his nonprofit SafePoint Trust's LifeSaver program. Koska personally ensures that the clinics are educated about safe injections and strives to implement auto-disable syringes as the national standard. During these meetings, he educates health officials, often showing undercover footage he's taken of their local clinics engaging in the dangerous behaviors which are leading to 230,000 HIV infections, 21 million Hepatitis infections, and 1.3 million deaths every year.
The sense of personal integrity inherited is the reason that he sees each project through until it’s completed. If national regulations aren’t on his side, he believes in staying put until the job is done. Most recently, Marc documented his trip to Tanzania where he met with the Honourable Dr. Lucy Nkya, the Deputy Minister for Health and Social Welfare, who has signed her country onto his campaign and to whom he donated 400,000 auto-disable LifeSaver syringes.
Today, Marc lives with his wife and three kids in Ashdown Forest, north of Brighton in Sussex, England. And when he’s not campaigning or presenting at a conference like TED (4m 46s) or Google Zeitgeist (10m 31s) he can be found playing tennis, cycling or paragliding. It has been great to get to know Marc and are honored that he chooses to wear Apolis and spread the word on his travels. We're also grateful for his keen eye and his dispatches from the field, here's his most recent from Addis Ababa: “…Met a woman who owns the finest weaving production factory in Ethiopia. I bought a couple of scarves, I will send to you early next week. Her artisan studio is the best I have seen in Addis.” We are privileged to consider Marc an Apolis Advocate and we are pleased to share a brief overview of his work.
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