Passport to Death
By Rod Eime
Exotic Diseases
Images from the old black and white "scaries" loom.
Boris Karlof, his putrid flesh dropping off in slabs, moans
and groans as he drags himself from the crypt.
Truth is, some of the worst diseases will make Karlof's Hollywood
tribulations look like a kid's tea party. There's a frightening
range of exotic diseases waiting to attack the unwary traveller,
many able to cause rapid and painful death. Here is a roll-call
of some of the worst.
- Malaria: This insidious, mosquito-borne disease
kills 2 million people annually, and can even effect the
most careful travellers. The Plasmodium parasite, of which
there are three varieties, is a fiercely resistant bug that
keeps medical researchers constantly on their toes. Malaria
is common in tropical climates and locations, of which West
Africa, PNG and Borneo are among the worst.
Malaria starts as a flu-like attack, often with acute fever,
but then buggers your organs, throws you into a coma, and
ultimately kills you after considerable misery.
- Hepatitis: Again, this viral disease comes in three
colourful variations; A, B and C. Hep A, which you get in
areas of poor sanitation and hygiene, is the most common
and makes you sick as a dog, but is the most easily preventable.
The B Type is mainly confined to junkies and the like and
can totally clap out your liver, while C is rare enough
to ignore for this exercise.
Hepatitis commonly produces nausea, vomiting, pain, jaundice
and dark piss. Hep B is the most likely to kill you when
your liver expires. Dr Susan Hou says in Dangerous Places,
"The majority of people with Hep B do not die, but
spend a month wishing they would."
- HIV/AIDS: You should know about AIDS by now, and
you should know that it is a bloody scary disease that is
now the leading killer of young American men and women (Journal
of the American Medical Assoc). It's ripping through developing
and Third World countries like wildfire, despite attempts
to play it down. The early fables about HIV/AIDS being a
"gay" or "black" disease are proven
bullshit, even though these groups are still over-represented
in statistics.
You get HIV first (then AIDS), by having unprotected sex
with an infected person, or by sharing needles. Transfusions
with infected blood is also a good way to come by HIV. With
AIDS you get fever, night sweats and lose weight before
other opportunistic diseases like pneumonia move in to finish
you off.
- Ebola Virus: Like something out of the X-Files,
this mysterious affliction kills quickly and dramatically
with massive internal bleeding, leading to its description
by locals as a "melting" disease. Fortunately
it is mainly limited to an area in Northern Congo and is
still reasonably rare.
You have about one chance in ten of surviving a dose of
Ebola. Due to its localised occurrences, virulence and resistance
to any treatment, conspiracy theories about its origin abound.
- Typhoid: Mainly confined to Africa, Asia and Central
America, we often hear about this ferocious bacterial (Salmonella
typhi) disease when sanitation is destroyed by some natural
disaster and people end up eating their own sewage.
Typhoid lasts about a month, causes intense abdominal pain
and turns your shit to green soup. The bacteria can cause
ulcerations of the intestine that sometimes burst, flooding
your guts with the contents of your infected bowels.
- Tuberculosis: Once almost eradicated, TB is making
a comeback, particularly in poorer countries and communities,
killing 2-3 million people each year. You catch TB by inhaling
droplets of moisture expelled by an infected person when
they cough or sneeze.
The Mycobacterium tuberculosis then latches itself onto
your lungs' mucous membrane and goes to town, forming hard
swellings that grow and consume healthy tissue. You slowly
cough out your disintegrating lungs, often in bloodied clumps
of mucous, with 60% of sufferers dying within three years.
Space prevents me from detailing the many more vivid afflications
you can unwittingly acquire whilst travelling, but Bubonic
Plague, Yellow Fever, Tetanus, Meningitis, Rabies and Leprosy
make for entertaining study.
According to Paul Prociv, Associate Professor in Medical
Parasitology, University of Queensland, getting sick whilst
overseas "can really stuff your life up, even it doesn't
kill you!" Dr Provic, an expert in traveller's health,
nevertheless rates death by exotic disease pretty unlucky.
His studies show that around 10-15 travelling Australians
will die each year by such cause, malaria being the most common.
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