Burkitt, who spent his early years in Laragh before his family moved to Dublin, was working as a surgeon in Uganda when he came across several children suffering from fast-spreading tumours in the head and neck.

    After getting in touch with a host of hospitals across Africa, he became the first to plot the previously unknown disease.

    This week, his Fermanagh compatriot John Phillips travelled to Malawi, where he will remain for six weeks overseeing a project aimed at improving treatment and diagnostic tests for Burkitt’s Lymphoma.

    The Enniskillen paediatrician has seen the disease many times during his work in Africa, where that form of cancer is common in the hot, wet zones where mosquitoes are found.

    Mr Phillips explains that both malaria and the Epstein Barr virus play a part in the formation of the tumours, which affect the B-lymphocytes in the body’s immune system.

    Sufferers often end up with huge swellings in the face and eyes, although Mr Phillips explains that the tumours can often appear in other parts of the body such as the stomach, bones or thyroid gland, and as a result may be difficult to diagnose. Most people die within six months of the first symptoms if the cancer goes untreated.

    Injections of the drug cyclophosphamide can have dramatic effects in some cases, shrinking the tumours in a matter of days, but some patients don’t respond at all.

    In Malawi, Mr Phillips is trialling a new treatment by combining cyclophosphamide with another drug that has shown promise in laboratory tests. He hopes that in combination the drugs will cure many more people.

    His former colleagues in Malawi are looking forward to the extra help, Mr Phillips says as he prepares for departure. He has now retired as a paediatrician in the Erne Hospital but spent much of his career in Africa.

    Born in southern India, Mr Phillips’s schooling took place in Edinburgh but his early upbringing drew him to head back out into the wider world once he had qualified as a doctor.

    He explains that his father worked in the leather manufacturing industry in India and his mother had been a teacher at the Women’s Christian College in Madras. This upbringing made it difficult to integrate in Scotland, not least because he couldn’t kick a football.

    After university, Mr Phillips investigated the possibility of medical missionary work.

    “Coming from abroad I had a wider understanding of the world. I knew there were great needs elsewhere,” he says.

    “In a lot of ways I was an outsider. I felt that this pointed me in that sort of direction.”

    The top priority was to find a unit that trained nurses and was run on an ecumenical basis, he says.

    This brought him to a hospital jointly run by the Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian churches in eastern Nigeria, where sometime later Mr Phillips found himself in the middle of the Biafran war.

    The two-and-a-half-year conflict broke out when one part of Nigeria attempted to secede from the rest. It was this war that gave rise to the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres after people recognised that preparations were vital to be able to cope when such conflicts broke out.

    “It was grim at times, especially when there is no obvious end to it,” he says.

    “The malnutrition was terrible, casualties, shortages, the corrupting influences of war were dreadful.”

    Ordinarily, the hospital staff worked extremely long hours and in fact the conflict brought slightly more free time than before.

    Normal activities such as training nurses and giving lectures were suspended and a curfew was imposed. Fortunately there was a library nearby and Mr Phillips spent many of his evenings reading books by torch light.

    After the war, he returned to Scotland and gained more qualifications before heading to Malawi to a Church of Scotland-backed hospital that offered obstetrics and paediatrics. Two, sometimes three doctors treated 3,000 babies a year - three times the workload of the Erne Hospital.

    There was no X-ray and a very limited laboratory, and the doctors found themselves turning their hands to all sorts of work - teaching, keeping accounts, filling in data, writing reports and making sure the staff were paid.

    After 10 years there, Mr Philips became paediatrician in Lilongwe Central Hospital in the capital of Malawi.

    “That was a busy job too because normally half the population of the country is in the paediatric age group and they are a lot sicker,” he says. “Among the under-fives, more than 60 per cent are seriously underweight.”

    In 1986, Mr Phillips came across the mystifying case of a small boy who just did not seem to respond to treatment. He was treated for TB and a variety of other illnesses but simply didn’t get better.

    The last time Mr Phillips had been home in the UK he had watched a TV programme about a strange new disease called Aids. He carried out an HIV test which proved positive. The boy died the same weekend - the first child in Malawi to be identified as an Aids patient.

    More and more cases appeared, although it was often impossible to carry out a diagnosis. The hospital didn’t have the tests and they weren’t very good anyway. Even when more tests eventually became available, the priority was to use them for screening blood and only the few left over could be used to test the patients themselves.

    “By 1988 or 1989 it was already exponentially occurring,” Mr Phillips says.

    At the time the World Health Organisation had a slogan “Health for all by the Year 2000”. In lectures, Mr Phillips warned that “Aids for all by the Year 2000” would be a much more achievable objective.

    By the time he left in 1994 the hospital had 220 beds, with one or two doctors in charge, backed up with paramedics. Mr Phillips was paediatrician for the northern and central region and spent a fair bit of time travelling from district to district.

    “Then Baroness Chalker said we weren’t cost-effective and paid us off,” he says.

    Enniskillen was the next port of call. Mr Phillips became the Erne Hospital’s first resident paediatrician and this allowed the Sperrin Lakeland Trust to set up a maternity unit.

    These days Mr Phillips is retired. He is married to Sheila and has two children, Rachel, who is studying medicine at Edinburgh University, and Ross, who is at Portora and hopes to study engineering in Bristol.

    Mr Phillips plays chess and is an elder and Sunday school teacher in Enniskillen Presbyterian Church. He is involved in quite a few cross-community ventures, including Fermanagh Churches Forum and Faith and Friendship.

    As a former chairman of Enniskillen Together, he noticed that almost all the people involved had lived outside Northern Ireland at some time or other.

    “The people had knocked around the world, got a much wider view of things and realised we are very fortunate here in Northern Ireland and there are much bigger differences and things to get excited over then the difference between Protestant and Catholic. We are all Christians,” he says.

    “The divisions within the Church are a terrible negative witness. “I don’t think that most Christians see what a priority it is for us to be together.”

    These divisions have real consequences for people on the ground. Mr Phillips has always noted the tendency for churches in places like India and Africa to compete over relief resources - hence the early determination to work in an ecumenical project. In the Biafran war, relief efforts were divided down the middle between Catholic and Protestant agencies, he says. When money is scarce there is a temptation to feed only those people that belong to your group.

    But at other times church groups found themselves working together to tackle Malawi’s huge health crisis.

    “We were able to come together and find we are all fighting in the same direction. People found they were all good fellow Christians,” he says.

    Such efforts put Northern Ireland’s problems very much into perspective.