Ben Fogle 'struggled' to return to rainforest after illness battle

TV adventurer Ben Fogle battled leishmaniasis after being bitten by a sand fly in 2008. Credit: This Morning / ITV / ITVX

Transcript

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.

00:37 [BLANK_AUDIO]