The Island of Madagascar is full of all kinds of amazing things that are found no where else in the world; lemurs, baobab trees, and the plague. Remember that disease that ravaged Europe during the Middle Ages killing thousands every day and caused cultural stagnantation. So many people died and people were no longer able to gather in public places that knowledge was no longer being created and disseminated.
Madagascar is one of the few places in the world were the plague continues to be found outside of laboratory settings. It isn’t a particularly wide spread disease but causes a number of deaths per year and causes the CDC to come and make the occasional visit. There has also been a recent out break of Rift Valley Fever privileging us to an additional visit by the CDC. I have learned all about how to recognize the plague, unfortunately the majority of its symptoms are flue like; one of the only ways to recognize plague without laboratory tests (near impossible here) is by the bulbous. A bulbous is a large swollen lymph node that will most likely produce puss.
One of the more visible diseases we have here on the east coast of Madagascar is called elephantits. This is a parasite that attacks your lymph nodes and causes them to swell to elephantine size. Then there are the tropical fevers; dengue, chicanguna, Malaria, West Nile Virus, ect ect
STOP WORRYING MOM! I don’t have any of these diseases the worst thing I have come down with is a really nasty fungal infection that covered the majority of my feet and legs, but I am on the mend. A week and a half into my three-week treatment I am asymptomatic and will hopefully stay that way. I wish I had some pictures to show you all of what this looked like, but the only ones there are are on my brother’s camera so hopefully he will post them to the Internet eventually.
I think I contracted this fungus last time I was in Tamatave, though I didn’t start to have any symptoms until Joe and I had arrived in Paradise (St. Marie, a small island off Madagascar’s north east coast). Tamatave is a disgusting and disease ridden place. It is Madagascar’s second largest city and largest port, the home of over 400,000 people, it has no functioning sewer system and in the rainy season (which is starting now) the roads become one large cesspool. Thus Tamatave is the perfect breeding ground for disease. So really I have been lucky, while a fungal infection is annoying and itchy as all hell it has no long-term effects and can be easily treated with a lot of Clotrimazole cream. Here’s hoping that I don’t contract anything worse during my next 11 months in country.
