Trevor Keel

On the 24th of December 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched (weather permitting) and ultimately give humanity the opportunity to understand even more about the universe. Gold, a metal that was born in the stars billions of years ago, has long played a critical role in space exploration - the JWST included.

It’s not just the miners that are having a positive impact on SDG 3, gold itself is a critical material in the healthcare sector. It is used in a large number of diagnostic tools, and is of increasing interest to companies developing innovative new ways to treat disease. These applications often go unnoticed, but are an important part of gold’s story.

Gold is all around us and it touches many aspects of our life, often without us even knowing it. Explore mine to market – gold’s untold story, our new interactive map where you can discover gold's many uses.

As schools and workplaces have begun to reopen, the demand for testing has started to increase, placing many systems under considerable pressure.

The need for accurate, rapid and cost-effective gold-based testing tools is more acute now than has been at any other point throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as some countries begin to emerge from lockdown.

Tomorrow (25th April) is World Malaria Day, a day the World Gold Council has often marked as a consequence of the important link between its member companies and the fight against the disease.

The UK is home for me, and the subject of COVID-19 diagnostics has never been far away from the front pages. The UK government has repeatedly championed the important role antibody testing will play in getting our lives back to normal... However, achieving this has turned out to be far from straight forward.

There is an aspect to gold’s role in our society which tends to receive much less attention: it is a critical component in many diagnostic test kits.

Today is World Malaria Day and, unfortunately, some of the key messages of the day are less positive than we have seen in recent years.