Malaria: Return to Fever Road
Documentary which reveals the harsh realities of malaria within a rural Kenyan village community, highlighting man's endless fight against a disease which kills millions each year.
Documentary highlighting man's interminable fight against malaria, a disease which kills millions every year and which is continuing to worsen.
Filmed on three continents over eighteen months, it delivers an up-to-date account of the global malaria situation from the perspectives of a few heroic individuals, each fighting their own very different battles against the disease.
The film reveals the harsh realities of malaria within a rural Kenyan village community, telling the story of Peter Kombo, chief of Kiagware village in the Kisii highlands, as he battles through the malaria season.
Many of his villagers, particularly the young, are dangerously sick, and Chief Kombo struggles to get more help for them from the local authorities, without success. Unable to afford transport to their district hospital, the people of Kiagware turn instead to local herbalists and to untrained doctors for treatment.
These quacks can wrongly prescribe western drugs, sometimes with fatal consequences, so Chief Kombo is faced with a deadly dilemma - to stop them treating altogether and leave his people no hope at all, or allow them to continue and risk more deaths.
The desperate case of the Mauti family highlights just how difficult Chief Kombo's task is. Touched by their plight, he borrows money to pay for their son Walter to be taken to hospital. It comes just in time, as one more day without treatment could have cost Walter's life. But as Chief Kombo points out, he cannot pay for everyone in the village, and not long after Walter returns from hospital he has malaria again.
This 2009 update includes a brief report of the changes in the village and attitudes to malaria as a direct result of the transmission in the UK of the original film.
Last on
