TV adventurer Ben Fogle battled leishmaniasis after being bitten by a sand fly in 2008.
Credit: This Morning / ITV / ITVX
Credit: This Morning / ITV / ITVX
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00:00 It was a bit of a heroin trip for you, wasn't it?
00:02 Well, I did a series years ago called Extreme Dreams,
00:05 and I contracted a disease called leishmaniasis.
00:07 It's one of the world's neglected diseases,
00:10 affects lots of people, lots of people die from it.
00:12 And the treatment is pretty archaic.
00:14 It hasn't advanced because not enough wealthy Westerners
00:18 get it for pharmaceutical companies
00:20 to want to come up with a vaccine.
00:22 So it's still a chemotherapy to treat it.
00:24 And I was off work for a long time
00:27 and had some pretty extreme courses of treatment.
00:31 So it was a struggle to go back into the rainforest
00:34 where I was very vulnerable.
00:35 I was living with the Bengeli.
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