May 30 - Malaria Anyone?

May 30

Every now and then you meet travellers making their way through Africa who have been inexplicably advised not to take antimalarial medications by their all knowing Western doctors. Their response to your amazement at this decision is usually something along the lines of ‘I’ll just treat it if I get it.’

Okay, so at Queen’s we see the little local kids who die in their dozens every day without access to good medications or medical care, mosquito nets or repellents, right? And as a tourist you’re going to have ready access to medical care, and if not you’ll have some treatment on hand that you can take in the interim, true? Plus, how many travellers do you really hear of who actually get malaria, it’s mostly expats, isn’t it?

All reasonable points, but given the similar lack of immunity between the average African child and an adult tourist, the often remote nature of travellers and swiftness of malaria, along with the low proportion of travellers compared to people living here, none of these arguments really stack up. And once you’ve seen the clinical effectiveness and swiftness with which this little parasite can do its thing, you quickly realise that this reasoning is nothing short of madness… something that one of our good Australian friends here recently found out.

Despite being in the centre of the biggest city in the country, where all medical personnel are acutely aware of malaria and have ready access to very good treatments, he was hospitalised within hours of his first few fevers. Two days later, even with all the appropriate medicines in his system, they were talking about airlifts down to South Africa for more aggressive supportive care. Luckily for him, he remained in Malawi, and within a few days was even able to get home, but promptly flew back to Australia for follow up treatment of complications that had arisen. Not exactly what he bargained for only being here for a short stay and in a city the whole time, thus thinking that antimalarials would be a redundant idea. Think again, I guess.