| I leave for Kenya in one week! Between this trip and previous ones, I've been vaccinated for Tetanus, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Rabies, Yellow Fever, Typhoid, and Polio. And I've got a nice stash of malaria meds (Malarone is my drug of choice there) and some antibiotics just in case (Azithromycin). Plus some probiotics too (Jarro Dophilus). And Benedryl for the bug bites.
So with all of that, unbelievably, there are still diseases out there to get. Dengue fever is one. AIDS is another (I'm going to an area with a rather high HIV/AIDS rate). And then there's African Sleeping Sickness, a disease that sounds terrifying. It's one that, until now, I knew nearly nothing about. So I decided to take a look and find out more about it.
African Sleeping Sickness is transmitted by the tsetse fly, a bug that feeds on human blood, and its' endemic all over Sub-Saharan Africa. Left untreated, the disease is lethal. It's caused by a protazoa, and there are two forms, called East African and West African, even though they don't entirely respect the geographic boundaries that their names imply. Kenya's got the East African version, which shows symptoms and progresses much faster than the West African one. The good news is that Kenya has under 50 reported cases per year. The bad news is that the rural poor who are most at risk for the disease might have it but not report it. The disease begins with itching, headaches, fevers, joint pain, etc, and at that point it's easier to treat. Then it moves into the brain and - if left untreated - it's fatal. The treatments for the latter stage aren't great either - sometimes they kill the patients. Long story short: Don't get this disease. |
