by John Toscano

Created on: September 06, 2008

I need to begin by confessing something. I have behaved recklessly, irresponsibly and in a manner that puts others at risk. I frequently use a practice, frowned upon by the medical community, known as self-medication. Living as I do in a country where "prescription" drugs are freely available across the counter at pharmacies, I often diagnose illnesses in myself and my children and then buy what I believe to be the correct medication. There are various practical reasons for doing this but this week the risks entailed by this approach were brought home to me quite sharply.

My, son, who is two years old, was feverish for several days. Since we live in West Africa, I assumed he had malaria and gave him some of the artesunate syrup which I keep in the fridge for just such occasions. After giving him the recommended dosage over a period of three days, his fever continued. When he developed a runny nose and sore throat, I now assumed that some sort of cold virus was causing his fever and waited for nature to take its course and for his temperature to return to normal. When it still remained high, there was nothing else to do but make the long journey to the clinic, where a simple test revealed the presence of malarial parasites in his blood. After starting a further course of anti-malarials, this time based on combination therapy, he was back to his normal self within hours.

I might well be called irresponsible for not going straight to a doctor and allowing a small boy to suffer with malaria for days. Fair enough, but he managed to keep going to play-school every day and never appeared seriously ill. More to the point, living with periodic malarial infections is a fact of life for most people in much of West Africa and I now feel re-assured that this episode has built up his natural immunity, which will help him to cope with future infections. Not that I am recommending this as a way of deliberately enhancing immunity.

My real act of irresponsibility was to naively think that I could treat malaria simply by giving my patient artesunate. Here some explanation is needed. Artesunate is one of a group of anti-malarial drugs, all derived from a Chinese herb, Artemisia annua, that has long been used in traditional medicine to combat many different illnesses, including skin diseases, cancer and of course malaria. It is now grown on a vast scale to provide the world with its most effective weapon so far in the fight against malaria. And such a weapon is needed very badly.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>