![]() ![]() “Something always feeds back into the system,” is how the situation seems to the local people. Following the logic of economic expansion, African governments have made health into a product. The Fever reveals the international connections that determine the fate of so many impoverished patients: a pharmaceutical company such as the Swiss firm Novartis defends their market for the most popular malaria medication the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested heavily in a company´s (Glaxo Smith Kline) vaccine that doesn’t work the World Health Organisation (WHO) uses their approval process to direct the distribution of medicines, often to the benefit of Western companies. But their own governments do not act much better: Rehema argues eloquently that the authorities in Kampala and Nairobi rather work with global pharmaceutical companies - for tax reasons - than with their own people. She has to battle prejudice that appeared with colonialism in Africa: herbalists were considered to be witches by Christian missionaries, herbal treatment therefore criminalized. Rehema Namyalo is an activist who has dedicated herself to raise the standing of traditional herbal medicine. The plant Artemisia annua, for example, contains an active ingredient that – when made into a tea – enables the immune system to deal with an infection. In Uganda and Kenya she found people who have taken action against malaria using local strategies. Katharina Weingartner takes us in her film, The Fever, to an area that she calls the “ground zero” of malaria: the countries around the Lake Victoria basin in East Africa. ![]() The parasite Plasmodium falciparum is transmitted by mosquitoes and mostly finds its victims among children, while a global industry is attempting to control this epidemic. One dead child every minute – this stark equation is the toll that Malaria is still taking in Africa. ![]()
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