´óÏó´«Ã½

For this special edition of Witness History, we join Pumza Fihlani in Johannesburg for five extraordinary stories on the history of health. We meet the activists who took on the South African government and big pharmaceutical companies to secure access to affordable HIV drugs. We head to China to visit the scientists who used an ancient traditional medicine to find a cure for malaria. In Pakistan, we talk to Bilquis Edhi, who together with her husband Abdul Sattar Edhi, built one of the largest welfare charities in the world, training thousands of nurses and setting up clinics across the country. We journey back to post Second World War Britain and a virologist who worked at the Common Cold Unit, a research project that depended on thousands of people volunteering to catch a cold. Finally, we learn about the German psychiatrist Dr Alois Alzheimer who treated a 51-year-old woman, Auguste Deter, who had developed a type of dementia. The illness he documented became known as Alzheimer's disease.