Malaria’s a parasite. Just thinking about it gives me the heebie-jeebies. Like the monster in the movie Alien, malaria sporozoites invade a human “host” and then use him or her as a medium for reproduction. The victim becomes a meat puppet – an incubator, nursery, and food supply for another creature’s offspring. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
Stage One: Chills, accompanied by headache, fatigue, muscle aches, and the Three Horsemen of intestinal distress: nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
Stage Two: Fever, accompanied by a sensation that one’s skin is both dry and burning.
Stage Three: Drenching sweat, accompanied by fatigue, malaise, and – not surprisingly – depression. Utterly exhausted by this point, the patient usually collapses into sleep.
After all that, the victim might feel fine again for two or three days, but then it begins all over again. Each attack coincides with a wave of red blood cell destruction as the invaders cycle through repeated phases of reproduction. It’s a wonder that the last stage doesn’t end with a toothy little alien bursting out of the victim’s chest and scuttling across the floor.
Untreated, malaria leads to a coma followed by a suffocating, internal-organ-disintegrating death. Like I said: heebie-jeebies.
The Romans noticed that malaria outbreaks occurred around swamps, and from that they incorrectly deduced that the illness was caused by “bad air” hovering over wetlands. This gave malaria its name. In Latin, mal = bad, and aria = air. Silly Romans. One wonders what they called the air wafting up from the corpses piled in the Coliseum – or from their own public toilets, for that matter.
So why all this attention to malaria, you might ask, in a blog about Mount Kilimanjaro? Well, despite the enormous gains that have been made against malaria elsewhere, it still ravages Africa. You may be stunned to learn, as I was, that sub-Saharan Africa alone accounts for nearly 90% of all malaria cases worldwide. Perhaps someone should build a canal there.