| ▲ | stephenhuey an hour ago | |
Some good info, but some kind of simplistic. I lived in Nigeria for the second half of my childhood in the 80s and 90s and got malaria several times. People come down with it all the time, and typically treat it, and you can recover without treatment also. Most people die from sickle cell anemia when young, but I know multiple outliers who have lived to middle age, and they might live longer yet. It's easy to test for malaria, if you actually think to test for malaria. In the 90s, we used to hear wild stories from people we knew who would come down with malaria shortly after returning to the USA and doctors and nurses would freak out not knowing what to do about it, and the medication would be expensive to obtain, so the conventional wisdom was also to remember to take a few pills with you on the plane back to the USA! It's sad but unsurprising that no one was able to treat these German workers in time. When I was a child, there was already talk of strains developing resistance, and this has gotten worse in the 21st century, and the airport workers caught the most deadly strain: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/27/malaria-outbre... | ||
| ▲ | codethief 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | |
> It's sad but unsurprising that no one was able to treat these German workers in time. Literally every pharmacy over here sells treatment against malaria – many have it in stock and even if they don't, they'll be able to get it for you within a few hours. Every major city (certainly every city with an airport where you could catch airport malaria) has a hospital with a department specifically for infectious and tropical diseases, where they'll happily take care of you. GPs ask you if you've been to the equator lately if you go see them with high fever. I'm not sure how a country where malaria is not common at all would be able to do any better? Also, as I mentioned in another comment, airport staff are instructed to watch out for malaria symptoms precisely because airport malaria is a thing. Something definitely went wrong here but from afar it surely doesn't look like a healthcare failure to me. Maybe the deceased stayed home, thinking they had caught a cold and would be able to sit it out? | ||