Parasite Unseen

One of my favorite classes in the Spring quarter was an elective course that my friend Katie G. convinced me to join. (Thanks Katie G!) I forget the actual name of the course, but it should've been called "Wow, Problems in Global Health are Really Super Hard". Or something along those lines. I loved that class, and not only because we managed to turn it into a weekly potluck. The prof did a great job of steering us away from the typical introductory global health discussions; instead of a class about how sad it was that all these developing nations suffered curable epidemics, for example, we'd talk about how epidemics actually happened - what made them grow, what made them self-limiting, and what that meant for the proper timing for any sort of intervention.

One of our best class discussions was about malaria - again, not the usual "Malaria is Bad" lecture, but a long conversation about whether certain malaria interventions were all that useful, or whether a hypothetical vaccine would ever even be able to wipe out malaria, given what we know about the disease. Really interesting stuff.

And I think about that discussion fairly often here. A significant part of my life in Tanzania is dedicated to the noble goal of Not Getting Malaria. 1) I spray myself in a vaguely bubble-gum-scented mosquito repellent around 7 PM each night, just as the little suckers start to appear. 2) I sleep under the bed net, every night, and am getting better at not thrashing around while I sleep and undoing my careful tucking of net under mattress. 3) And, of course, I take a big, electric-blue antibiotic pill every day in the hopes of protecting my liver from parasites. Because despite the first two measures, I definitely still get bitten - little pink spots all over, especially my ankles.

Taking prophylactic antibiotics every day does make me a little uneasy, but then, the prospect of malaria seems a lot worse. My American friend Teddy, who's been here for about a year, told me that he spent his first few months in Tanzania being sure he had malaria every time he felt the least bit queasy. "And every time, it turned out I didn't have it at all. So when I finally did get malaria, I initially thought to myself, 'Ok, well, I know it's not malaria. Made that mistake before.' And then they took me to the doctor. And then there are two days of my life that I can't remember at all."

So that's the aim, avoid having my own story like that. But the interesting thing is that native Tanzanian adults are pretty blase about it. When I recently visited my housemate Happy and asked whether she always folded her room's bed net so neatly, she confessed that she'd actually never used it since she moved into the room. "Eh." She's had malaria before. Yes, she gets it every few years or so. It's not that bad. And then I learned today that not one but two women at the office today currently have malaria, including our executive director. But, you know, they have things to do, they're not taking the day off for a little thing like that.

It sort of makes me feel like a wimp, really, all my drugs and nets and nervousness and they're shrugging it off like it's a headcold. Even if I know it'd be a lot worse for me, since I never had it as a child, I still feel like I ought to toughen up a bit. You can't even see this parasite, you know? How bad could it be? Suck it up, mzungu.