Documentary

Teun Bousema

in Interplay

Character
Teun Bousema

Director
Sanne Rovers

Country
Uganda/The Netherlands

Duration
20 min

Year
2025

In the countryside in northern Uganda, armed with petri dishes, cardboard cups and a vacuum cleaner, internationally renowned malaria researcher Teun Bousema, along with PhD student Daniel Ayo and his team, seeks to unravel the mysterious life cycle of the malaria parasite. But the parasite is elusive, constantly mutating, which increases the threat of drug resistance. Is this mutated parasite more infectious to mosquitoes? Interplay depicts the daily reality of the tireless scientific battle against this formidable and multifaceted opponent.

The malaria mosquito is born ‘clean’. Only after an infected blood meal and taking on various forms does the malaria parasite end up in the mosquito’s saliva, ready to claim a new human victim when the mosquito next bites. ‘It’s such a clever beast,’ says Bousema.

About Teun Bousema

Teun Bousema (1977) has dedicated his career to eradicating malaria, a disease which still claims more than 600,000 lives per year. Whereas most research focuses on how mosquitoes infect humans, Bousema takes the opposite approach and instead looks at how humans infect mosquitoes. He also explores ways to harness the human immune system to prevent further spread of the disease.

After earning his PhD at Radboud University Nijmegen, Bousema spent two years helping establish the Kilimanjaro Clinical Research Institute in Tanzania. He has been affiliated with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine since 2008 and has had his own research group at Radboud university medical center since 2012. He conducts fieldwork in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, among other countries.

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