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Originally Posted by Michaelangelica
Would you let this company go out with your daughter?
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One at a time, or the whole company at once?
Er...
Coming back to your previous question, the early symptoms was insomnia (like in
total insomnia, no shut-eye at all) for about a week. During the day, I felt fine - no problems at all. A little fuzzy in the head which I blamed on not sleeping. After about five or so days, the shivers started. Also only at night - during the day, nothing wrong. But at night, you can take a hot bath, the water's still too cold. You can sit in front of the hottest fire you can find, and still pile logs on. Your electric blanket is too cold on full blast. You get the idea. And this was middle summertime. And you sweat like a pig. But only at nighttime. During the day, everything's hunky-dory. No fever, sweat, shivers, nothing. After about the second week of this, I started peeing blood as my kidneys seized up. A day or two later, the pee turned black. Little gross, but seeing as you asked, at the same time, I started crapping blood. Black, dead blood. The black stool and black urine is where the term "black-water fever" came from for malaria.
Nevertheless, about another day or two later, my kidneys, liver, basically every other organ I have, seized up, and I started bleeding from my nose and gums, and even eyes. From there on, it would have taken about 24 to 48 hours and I would've been as dead as a doornail.
The doctors have actually phoned my parents, telling them that I've got about 48 hours left to live. And they called all my friends to come and say goodbye to me. Nobody told me about it. I just found all my family and friends around me, and I thought it was great. But I was so stoned on meds it didn't really matter. The docs at the intensive care ward they parked me in actually thought I was in the last stages of some as-yet unknown form of blood cancer.
But when the clever student found the malaria bugs in my blood, and they gave me the proper meds for it, I was right as rain within 24 hours.
...and that's my whole point:
Stop even thinking about bringing back DDT. Malaria isn't as bad as they make it out to be. What is bad, is the lack of proper identification mechanisms for the disease, and medicine. If, for instance, a little urine test strip can be manufactured that can test for malaria, and access to medicine can be arranged, then I suppose it'll just be "one of those things". You wake up with the shivers, you go pee on a little stick, you see you've got malaria, you swig a pill, you go back to bed. End of story. Distributing DDT all over the world will be at least as expensive as distributing meds.
Lasting effects? Not really. But my liver and kidneys look like swiss cheese, and will give me all the hell when I'm a few decades older, I guess.
But it only looks like swiss cheese because of late identification.
Malaria is by no means a terminal disease. What's killing people in the Third World is not malaria mozzies, but the lack of timely treatment.
