Thursday 22^nd December

More coffee, farewells, reunions, dinners, hospitable offspring…

Another 2S bit…

We received very stern advice re anti-malarial medication.  I don’t like taking antibiotics, not unless I have a major infection or disease.  I think – well it’s not just me thinking this, it is a widely-held belief – that they are vastly over-used in western countries, and that they are becoming ineffective because of this.  (Also…they have side effects to which I am prone and which I particularly dislike.)

I think I already wrote that, when we were in Port Vila, we went to buy some for Pete.  You can get this sort of medication over the counter, in Vanuatu.  I had decided not to take any, but the pharmacist, an expressionless Chinese woman, looked at me severely and said, flatly, “You have to take them.  You have no choice.”  So…I did.  (I am very obedient!)  We had a big plastic container of doxycycline on the tea & coffee shelf and it was my self-appointed task to dish out the drugs every night during dinner.  We hardly missed any, and were very diligent about swallowing them down with our pre-dinner G & Ts. 

So we didn’t get malaria… The funny thing is, we hardly saw any mosquitoes.  If there had been any, they would have been swarming around because every single living thing which had the ability or propensity to bite or sting loves to bite or sting our poor Pete.  He did get bitten, ofcourse, but only once or twice by mosquitoes.  So maybe we didn’t need to take our drugs after all.  But…maybe they were beneficial in another way, because we didn’t get any infections at all.  Infections spring forth at the least opportunity, in the tropics, especially in tropical water, fresh and salt.  We were very diligent about washing out any cuts or scrapes with diluted bleach (ouchy ouch) but we would have expected at least some of our wounds to blossom forth nastily.  But the doxycycline kept everything at bay.  We both started to develop a bit of Kerry’s painful eye infection (sorry Ann-Marie, my eye-phobic friend, I will not put in any further details,) but even that came and went without causing us any grief.

So…if you are travelling to malaria-prone countries, my advice is – take the drugs!