Of Africa he said it was my home. He had been the personal physician of Idi Amin Dada, the former Ugandan dictator, and had treated Nelson Mandela, the man who canceled apartheid from South Africa. In his life (a novel between Kipling, Salgari and Wilbur Smith) he had decided to deal with the last, refugees, HIV and Ebola sufferers. Assisting them all. The last challenge was to study Coronavirus in Zambia, where he was a consultant to the Ministry of Health and where he was carrying out a project in collaboration with the Sacco hospital in Milan. Just Covid cut Paolo Marandola, 82, a doctor from Pavia with an infinite curriculum. He got sick in a few days and on Saturday he went off to hospital in Lusaka.
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The departure
He had left Malpensa on 8 July and the day before had gone to greet the infectious disease specialist Massimo Galli. We met in Zambia many years ago – recalls the head of the infectious diseases department of the Sacco hospital – when I was dealing with HIV. We never lost sight of each other and last month asked me for a collaboration for a project in an area to be located near Lusaka. The idea, which I had gladly made myself available to with my boys, was to repeat what Sacco did in Castiglione d’Adda, the town transformed into a laboratory after carpet screening on all 4,700 inhabitants. It would have been an important experiment, useful for understanding what is circulating in Africa and for building defense strategies. Galli stops for a moment, then resumes moved: The project can continue the same, perhaps by naming it just to Paolo.
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shadow carousel
Paolo Marandola, the Italian doctor ch cur Mandela (and also Amin)
The carreer
Marandola – ordinary of Andrology in Pavia – happened in Africa by accident. It was a Comboni father who asked him for a volunteer period in Uganda. It was 1971 and Amin had just come to power with a coup. The dictator had driven out all British doctors – Marandola himself said in an interview with freelance Marco Simoncelli – and the new hospitals were all abandoned. The only Italian doctor in the ward took little to be appreciated by Amin, of which he became personal physician until 1975, when the killings ordered by the despot became public knowledge and ferociously tortured people arrived at the hospital. One day the journalist Carlo Rossella, then envoy of Panorama, asked him for help to interview Amin. That after reading the article – mocking – he became furious. The doctor was forced to flee and retreat to Zimbabwe, which at the time welcomed the heads of Africa National Congress – the party of which Mandela was leader – exiled from South Africa.
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The decision
Paul decided to stay there, taking care of those in bad shape after brutality in prison. Once president, Madiba wanted to meet that courageous doctor from Pavia. To which for some time he also entrusted his health. Then the doctor settled in Lusaka where he hosted, among other things, Enza Tomaselli, Craxi’s secretary who after Tangentopoli thought he was living in Zambia. The doctor’s children, Ivan and Candy, said that even in the last call, dad was thinking about his study on Covid and when the screening kits would arrive.
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August 5, 2020 (change August 5, 2020 | 22:27)
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