Dr Worawit Tantiwattanasap, director of Umphang Hospital, has spent his entire career treating patients along the remote and rugged terrain of the Thai-Myanmar border. "Border doctors are like soldiers, but the enemy isn't people or armies, but disease," he tells me in our interview on June 19. "Preventing epidemics from crossing into Thailand is crucial."
He has a passionate way of cutting through every policy debate about who deserves care and who doesn't. "Borders are concepts created on paper by maps; they don't exist in the wild," he says. "Mosquitos fly back and forth across the border, travel without passports, don't ask for visas. We have to take care of everyone; we shouldn't choose by nationality."
