Travel Forum / Destinations / Asia / December 2003

Malaria is still one of the biggest killers in Africa, because
treatment is so rare. It's not a great threat to tourists because they
usually carry drugs, and are usually close to treatment. Locals, OTOH,
may never see a clinic, a doctor, or any medicine in their lifetime.

Dunno, but ISTR he didn't think it that serious at first. At the time,
there was no clinic on Nias.

See my next post.

Turby the Turbosurfer

Not really.

Absolutely.

This was in 1979. IIRC, I was taking Chloroquine. I was taking it
daily, and switched to a weekly dose, or vice versa. I may have got
infected during the switchover, but the pills were not 100% effective
in any case. The bug might have just got past the drug. There was no
such thing as a mefloquinum -boost, at the time, I don't think.

I flew from Nairobi to Juba, in the Southern Sudan on Sudan Airways.
(Before we landed, one of the engines quit. Talk about a scary
flight...) In Juba, I got on a stern-paddle wheel boat going down the
Nile. One 3-level boat with a barge on either side and pushing 3
barges in front. An incredible trip. 3000 people on a boat made for
1000, lazily sliding down the river for a week through the Sudd, which
is a vast papyrus swamp. Somewhere on that trip, I got bit. The first
symptoms didn't show up until the last day, when we docked in Kosti, a
few hours south of Khartoum by truck. By the time I got to Khartoum, I
was in bad shape. The truck dropped me at a hotel, and I checked in. I
knew I was in trouble, and tried to go outside. I couldn't walk and
wound up crawling into the street. Someone picked me up, put me in the
back of a pickup, and drove me to a hospital. The doctors were on
lunch break, so I lay on a concrete bench for two hours. When they
came back, they took me into an office. While there, I vomited on the
doctor's shoes, and he slugged me with his fist. I spent the night
there with a glucose (dextrose?) IV, and mega doses of quinine. The
next day, I felt much better and left the hospital.

Malaria eggs take ~2 weeks to incubate and hatch. Quinine is only
effective on live bugs, not the eggs.

In the next two weeks, I went north to Atbara, on the Nile, then out
to Suakin, on the Red Sea. (Suakin is, like Lamu in Kenya, built out
of sea coral. The architecture is fascinating. Building blocks,
cement, aggregate, and plaster are all made from coral.) On the way
back, I stopped in a village in the middle of the desert - i think it
was Musmar. There was a festival going on. I took some nice pictures
of camel races and some Fuzzy Wuzzy (sp?) tribesmen. The next day, on
the road back to Atbara, the symptoms started showing again. I got a
fever, diarhea, headaches, muscle cramps and nausea about the time I
noticed the driver was headed off in the wrong direction. We didn't
speak a common language, so I couldn't figure out what was going on.
An hour later, we stopped in the middle of nowhere and he proudly
showed me the ruins of a WWII tank battle. When we got back to Atbara,
he dropped me at the hospital, where I spent another night on an IV in
a dirty, blood-soaked bed.

In both cases, the symptoms hit like a sledgehammer, with little
buildup, when I was far away from any help.

Turby the Turbosurfer