During this pre-trip preparation time I scheduled a visit with a physician who specialized in travel medicine. The following is a partial list of the diseases for which I recieved a vaccine or medication.
Diphtheria is an extremely contagious and life-threatening infection that usually attacks the throat and nose. It is contracted by breathing in bacteria after an infected person has coughed or sneezed or from close contact with discharges from an infected person's mouth, nose, throat, or skin. Early symptoms are a sore throat and mild fever, followed by the formation of a membrane over the throat and tonsils and which makes it hard to swallow or breath. If not treated, the bacteria will release a powerful toxin into the blood stream that damages the heart muscles and causes heart failure or paralysis of the breathing muscles.
Hepatitis A & B are both viruses that attack the liver. Hepatitis B, the more serious of the two, causes lifelong infection, cirrhosis of the liver, liver cancer, liver failure, and death. Both are contracted through the transmission of blood.
Japanese encephalitis is a virus contracted from a mosquito which has bitten an infected domestic pig or wild bird. Symptoms include; fever, headache, and neck rigidity, which may be followed by convulsions, mental retardation, coma and death.
Typhoid fever is contracted by eating food or drinking beverages that have been handled by a person who has typhoid fever or if sewage contaminated with the typhoid bacteria gets into the water you use for drinking or washing food. A Person with typhoid fever usually has a sustained fever as high as 103° to 104° F, that is sometimes accompanied by a rash of flat, rose-colored spots. If not treated, the fever may last for weeks or months, and around 20% die from complications of the infection..
Typhoid fever is very common in the developing world, where it affects close to 21.5 million people each year. In the United States there are only about 400 cases a year, and 75% of these are acquired while traveling abroad. It is worth a moment to consider why, someone like me, who lives in a zone thousands of miles away from any real danger of infection from these diseases, is able to procure a reasonable safeguard against them in a single afternoon, while those who live with the constant threat of them are largely not.
2 comments:
Thank you so much, Mr. Blackburn, for the 'Collections of Deadly Diseases' update. Not only has my knowledge of infectious and congenital bacteria been greatly increased, but so has my heart rate.
Having a full understanding of the complete range of potential threats my friend and spiritual advisor will be exposed to in the upcoming months is just slightly nerve-racking.
But, we can only clothe ourselves in a blanket of surreality for so long.
At least now, I can shed that blanket while being comforted with the fact that you have been successfully immunized with the proper amount of vaccines and travel medications.
NH
I hereby rescind that earlier statement. It seems, for now, that Mr. Blackburn, in the chaos, has left behind his medication.
Some sort of strange blue container in our refridgerator that was not there before, is there now.
And I can only suppose that it contains something of critical importance to my friend's survival.
So my heart rate being raised, my greatest fears realized, and my friend in Africa without vaccine, I just hope and pray that the mosquitos stay away from him. Which they probably will, since he left his deodorant and toothbrush in the trash can in our bathroom.
Nonetheless, I am sure he will be just fine, as he has circumnavigated many times before and in far grimier places.
My best to Winston as he traverses the West African subcontinent....
NH
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