a very good friend got back from a month in Vanawatu (sp?), an island near Fiji last Sunday. he was still sick with the flue when he landed but was not to bad off. Wed his wife calls me saying he is in an ice bath and his temp is now up to 105.8. after packing him on ice in the truck, of to the ER we go. ER pumped him full of pain meds and started running him through every machine they had there. we said malaria (i pick a little up in chad in 01, seen it allot over seas, and this looked like a duck to me), they said they are running test. at first they thought dingy fever, a rare untreatable Asian island virus. then they said malaria. after 7 hours in the ER up to the icu we go. then it seemed they could not get a hold of the correct medication. lots of this pharmacy, that place, no over there. he transferred out of the icu yesterday morning. come to find out the hospital could not get the "better" medication till yesterday afternoon. he was on whatever they had, an every other day thing. i stayed with him all Sat night so his wife could go home to get some good sleep and be with the kids. hard night. he yakt everything that went down, was insomniac and hallucinating, and was so week from not eating much for eight days, that his motor functions could not get water to his mouth. plus all the other great stuff that comes with malaria. he got four hours of sleep that night, i got three.

problems with the picture that i see. we were in a hall bed in the ER. lack of space could not get us a room. three beds per hall in the ER. days to get the meds for malaria. we were kicked out of icu by two other incoming patients. more lack of beds there. even with a good medical/patient history, it took 7 hours of testing to confirm something we told them he had when we showed up. i have been at the hospital  more that i have been home and it makes me hate that place more that ever now. what would have happened if the general public got this bad? no beds, no clue, no meds. but if it were not for modern medicine and doctors, we would have lost him last week.

please keep us in your prayers. he does not seem to be out of the storm and this is taking a toll on his family. thanks.

edit- title for pic added

Wow, prayers sent

In my prayers..

Wow man good luck and prayers sent.

Why would he go someplace where malaria is present and not take the proper prophylactic drugs? They are fairly easy to come by, having taken them in the past for a business trip. The vaccinations I took were not all that hard to come by either, although one was only available at the county health department.

In any case, I feel bad for him and hope he gets better soon. Maybe his case will remind people why the vaccinations and anti-malaria pills are a good thing to get before traveling to certain areas of the world.

i had it once cloriquin is a nasty drug can affect eysight hope all is well

  Click what hospital is your friend staying?  Is it Kaiser?  So far I am not happy with Kaiser and I'm switching over coming my open enrollment month.  

  Hope your friend gets better.  I'm sure your friend and his family really appreciate the help.  Good friends are like gold nowadays.  

  Looks like another hospital is needed in your area but we all know that's highly unlikely at this time and atmosphere.

I took chloroquin and meflaquin for about a year and half.  It affects people differently.  I made me slightly short-sighted, and that lasted for a few years after I got back.  That medication made one of my other friends an insomniac.  I think that he averaged less than 3 hours of sleep a day for at least a couple of years.

My great uncle got malaria in Guadalcanal in WW2.  He go the shakes about every 3 of 4 days, but he lived to be in his late 90's.

I've known several people to get dengue fever.  There are 4 different variants, but once you catch one variant, you'll never catch the same variant again.

Best of luck to your friend and his family.  Malaria is nothing to play around with.

Same with my father (Guadalcanal, Solomons, etc.), all his life he got recurrences. He be stuck in bed shaking and sweating so bad he'd soak the bed.

Tropical diseases are nothing to serious business.

Yeah, but if the Hospital didn't make a lot of money by ruling out every other possible cause of the sickness, they wouldn't have the money to let all the other non-paying customers be serviced.

+1

Well, it's probably small consolation, but your experience has convinced me to never go to tropical areas without getting the vaccinations FIRST!!



Hope your friend recovers quickly and completely.

Malaria has spread geographically in the last few years...

The problem with malaria is that since it's from a parasite carried by mosquitoes you have to take pills and some of them like malarone (sp?) have the tendency to have weird side effects like nightmares...

Just think , once government is running health care, ALL hospital experiences could be this great.

+1 OP seems to be in cali...it sure does suck though.

I hate to be cynical, but notice the OP is from CA. It doesn't surprise me that such a liberal state (not all the people there) would have such problems with their medical facilities. It will definitely be like this... probably worse, in the whole country, if maobama has his way with the healthcare industry.

thanks so much. we go him home today. he is able to get himself to the jon now and is no longer doing the syco sweaty insomniac babble (sp?). he can't remember any of the four days he spent in the icu. my wife got back from dropping off food/dinner to the family and she said he is keeping it down too. out of the four, he had the plasmodium falciparum strand of malaria. after 8 days of this one, it can be lethal. we think he was in his eighth or ninth day when he checked in to the ER.

i read up a little on it and plasmodium falciparum and it kills one two three million people a year.
90% of all malaria deaths are from this one. vaccinations people.

pic from 6-14. the day he transferred out of icu. some of the junk he was on.


edit- grammar, pic fixed.

Pf is a nasty, nasty bug. FWIW, there is no vaccination for Pf or the other types of malaria. Travelers to endemic areas should take prophylactic meds (mefloquine, Malarone, and doxycycline are most common). Locals should use permethrin-treated mosquito nets over beds, good window screens, and whatever vector control is feasible.

better some minor side effects than catching malaria. I did not experience any side effects from what i was taking.

The prophylactics are not affective against all strains and the vaccine is not 100%........................

A little mosquito repellant goes a long way.

Yes, they are effective against all species, and there is no vaccine for malaria. Drug resistance is regional and not strictly associated with one species or another. That is, you'll find drug-resistant P. vivax and P. falciparum, but only in some parts of the world. There is resistance to some meds (for instance, Chloroquine resistance is widespread now, and there is Mefloquine resistance on the Thai-Burmese and Thai-Cambodian borders). However, doxycycline and malarone still work fine as prophylactics everywhere, and mefloquine is still fine throughout Africa and in parts of Asia and South/Central America.