Mosquitos SUCK!!!

As a follow up to my last Blog which took a look at the funny side of me getting malaria I thought I'd take a more serious look at malaria so we remember the 1 million people a year who die from it.  For those of you wanting to get a nice case of malaria, maybe this can be used to help you out also.

Every traveler should have a basic knowledge of malaria and diseases prevalent in the areas in which they will be travelling. The easiest way to do this is to tell your doctor where you will be going. The doctor can access the CDC website and find out what kinds of shots you should get before you head out. This should be done well enough in advance so you don’t board the plane and then break out in an allergic reaction to the shot you just received. Also some shots need to be taken in a series so plan ahead.


On top of that you need to know that Malaria pills do not guarantee that you won’t get malaria, they only make it less likely. Also the malaria medicine has to be appropriate to the strain of malaria in the area in which you are going to travel. You can’t just use the pills from your last trip or barrow a friends left over pills unless you are going back to the same place.

All of this is pretty basic info – now I want to give you some facts on malaria that are not only shocking, but true. These facts and more can be found on the RBM website at www.rollbackmalaria.org

Only the facts…

• Malaria's transferred from person to person via a mosquito bite.

• Only female mosquitos transmit malaria. The female has whiskers.

• Not all female mosquito’s carry malaria.



• The vast majority of malaria deaths occur in Sub-Sahara Africa.

• Malaria costs Africa more than $12 Billion in lost GDP yearly.

• Malaria is responsible for over 1 million deaths a year.

• Malaria is Africa’s number one killer of children under five.

• Malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds.

• Malaria accounts for one in five of all childhood deaths in Africa.

• African children have 1.6 – 5.4 episodes of malaria per year.

• 40% of the world’s children live in malaria-endemic countries.

• Malaria causes poverty, poverty opens the door for malaria.



• Mosquito Nets can prevent a half million death per year.

• The cost of a treated mosquito net is about $1.70.

• The cost to re-treat a net for a year is about $0.60

FACT: For $2.00 you can buy a mosquito net for a child in Africa and reduce work and school loss and even save a life. So do something today. Go on line to your favorite charity and see if they have a mosquito net purchasing program. If they don’t, make a donation to Assist International at www.assistinternational.org and earmark it for mosquito nets.

The key to the casual traveler is to know the symptoms and check in with your doctor if you come down with any of them within 9–14 days of possible exposure to Malaria. Symptoms include fever, headache, vomiting and other flu like symptoms. Knowing this shouldn’t keep you from getting out there and living life.

Now that's Malariaous

The first thing you need to know about Malaria is that most doctors in the U.S. have never come across a case of malaria, so you’ll pretty much be on your own as far as diagnosing it.

The second thing you need to know about Malaria is that it isn’t a sexually transmitted disease, unless of course you consider swapping bodily fluids with a mosquito, sex. Evidently some of my wife’s friends missed this point when they sent her their condolences and in hushed tones ask, “How are you doing with all of this.”

When I came down with Malaria "from sharing a dirty mosquito" in Northern Uganda I had no idea what the symptoms really were or that it would take two weeks to feel the effects, which in my travel world was a short eternity ago. Because I was travelling to Africa so frequently I had quit taking the preventative drug because at some point the danger of living on the drugs out ways the risk of Malaria. Where I went wrong was in not knowing the symptoms.

The first flu like symptoms hit me late on a Friday night after a returning from my oldest son’s high school football game to a yard and trees draped in toilet paper. My wife and I decided it was better to clean it up for him than to wait for the dew to set in and make a real mess. In the middle of cleaning I started complaining about chills and not feeling good, which solicited from my wife our family mantra, “Buck up and quit being a wimp”.

The second round of symptoms struck the next morning, but since being a wimp was already ruled out by my wife I set off for the Sierra foothills with my youngest son to go fishing. Something I had promised to do. By time I got home I tumbled into bed shaking like a leaf.

Round three hit the next morning as we were headed out the door to church. To this I received the, “If that’s the kind of dad you want to be go ahead and stay home” speech. I stayed home. Not that I wanted to be that kind of dad, but no one wants a sweating, chilling, shaking, man sharing a pew with them and I certainly didn’t want to be there in my condition.

Malaria symptoms hit every ten to twelve hours. In between you start feeling good like you’re whipping the flu, so you get up, shower, shave and try to forge on. Then it hits you again.

Round four struck as we were preparing to go to another sporting event for one of my four boys, I can’t remember which one or what sport because by now I wasn’t right in the head. Again choosing to be “one of those dad’s” I stayed home.

In our family if you’re sick don’t expect chicken soup to be delivered to your room anytime soon. You just get banished to your room and if by some chance you prove to be strong enough to rejoin the pack, then more power to you.

On day four, in between rounds of sweating and freezing I drug myself to the office to answer emails before setting out to driving 450 miles to San Diego. My colleagues took one look at me, which was one more look than my family had given me, and sent me home.

At home I argued that the drive south would do me good and I would probably complete my recovery “from the flu” somewhere between Bakersfield and Castaic. I was seriously not thinking right. I had also convinced myself that the reason my pee was bright orange was because I was living entirely on orange Gatorade in an attempt to flush this nasty flu from my system. (A point not lost by my friends who later delivered a huge jug to my hospital room) My wife sent me to bed with the words, “You don’t look to good”. Evidently she finally looked at me. This got her thinking and researching which is her specialty.

Next thing I knew I was being rushed to the hospital by her while being briefed that I had every symptom of Malaria except “coma and death come quickly”.

The hospital was another problem. No matter how many times we told them I had Malaria they refused to believe us and placed the both of us in an isolated room deep in the bowels of the hospital with a big vent to suck out all of our germs. This was just to occupy us while they called the CDC who still checks on me periodically. They wouldn’t even feed us they just stuck the food outside the door and ran. They even had the audacity to tell me after tests that they had ruled out malaria.

By coincidence (God’s way of working anonymously) there was a Ghanaian doctor in the hospital that had trained in one of the hospitals I had been working at in Kumasi, Ghana. When they finally brought him to see me (This I remember as well as I remember the hallucinations of cockroaches dressed in nurse outfits), he looked at me from the door way and said, “You have Malaria. I’ll get you fixed up in no time.”

If you’re one of those who thinks there are too many foreign doctors and nurses you might want to think again. Sooner or later you may come down with something that only they can recognize. Thank God for foreign doctors.