BTW - I had malaria about 5-6 times while growing up. What you describe sounds like a particularly bad case (1-2 of mine were like that). My experience, and that of my peer group (lower-middle class by western standards, top 0.1% by Tanzanian standards) was that if you got an early diagnosis and had access to drugs it was usually akin to a severe flu unless you got unlucky with the strain/severity.
It was culturally very normalised to get two malaria tests any time anyone felt sick, because the commonly accepted belief was that anything could be malaria, and false negatives were too common.
I always thought the main problem with malaria in Tanzania was that 99.9% of the country (especially rural areas) does not have access to quick testing and easy drugs, and for them it's a death sentence. That's not to downplay it, but more to emphasise the socioeconomic dimension.
I've actually gone back and worked with local duka la dawas (sorry about the spelling, my Kiswahili is really out of practice) in figuring out ways we can help rural populations get easier access to the medication. It's often not that it's not there, it's that the medicine is too expensive.
It's still such a horror show of a disease (among the many many other horror show diseases). My heart broke for every mother I saw with their feverish infants in the same waiting room I was in.
It permanently reset my pain scale. When I later had a pulmonary embolism and appendicitis, the doctors were confused that I said my pain was only 7 on a scale of 1 to 10.
The drug I took for it (mefloquine) didn't give me any unusual dreams, but it permanently altered something in my brain.
I don't agree that DDT is necessary to eradicate malaria. See for example that malaria has been eradicated in Thailand (except for border areas), but not (yet) in Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar, despite having the same climate. A combination of regular pesticides and flood control are sufficient - if the government is competent and dedicated. It's a political problem, not a technical problem.
RE: DDT, I didn't mean to imply it's the only way these days, just that there was a very good reason it was so popular in the former part of the 20th century. I love the tune to "Big Yellow Taxi" but it was never about "spots on my apples." It still is used in very rare and specific circumstances, but we have a lot better understanding of how to stop mosquito. Which is why they're really only a problem in poor countries, mitigation is unfortunately not cheap and convenient.
Wikipedia has:
>Cerebral malaria is the form of severe and complicated malaria with the worst neurological symptoms.
Glancing at this it may be more likely your brain was altered by the malaria than the mefloquine https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3056312/
Sorry to ask and if it is not too much to share - What kind of changes are you talking about?
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/after-40-years-most-...
https://mosquitoreviews.com/insecticides/ddt-resistant-mosqu...
> Several serious human health problems, including diabetes and hormonal disruptions, have been linked to DDT, and it is suspected to be carcinogenic.
So, no, it wasn't just the eagles.
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My guess is the drug was chloroquine, but not sure. Based on other’s experiences, I am glad I was young and dumb enough to opt for a questionably sterile injection.
I was fortunate to have made a friend that worked in oil services in Nigeria, and he had “malaria training” from Schlumberger, and the bottled water injection sounds crazy, but was the recommended treatment.
One of my closest friends from university was also a work colleague at the time he went on a recruiting trip to India and his travel doctor prescribed mefloquine for him. It's standard practice to keep taking the drugs for some time (2 weeks, IIRC) after leaving a malarial area, and he was noticeably mentally altered when he returned. He seemed uneasy with his eyes darting around, and he wasn't his normal outgoing self. He seemed a bit paranoid. The incident that brought it all into sharp focus involved a couple of colleagues that were your garden variety gossipy braggarts and I had a minor disagreement with one of them that we resolved quickly, but which prompted my friend to whisper to me "You don't get it. They're not good people." He gave me a look like I was the crazy one for believing the minor argument was resolved. (On the one hand, he was right. I would never trust the one any further than I could throw a fully loaded server rack. However, I still smiled, remained social, and watched my back.) I googled [mefloquine paranoia] and went down a deep rabbit hole. I found out that mefloquine has been suspected in several incidents of peace-keeping troops getting paranoid and attacking unarmed civilians. [mefloquine "freaky Friday"] or [mefloquine "wacky Wednesday"] may be a better search. Also, at least at that time, several sites said that if you had ever taken mefloquine in your life, you were ineligible for one of the front-line malarial treatments should you ever contract the disease.
Due to his mood changes / paranoia, I strongly suggested he talk to his doctor about coming off of his medication after just one week back in the U.S.
> 100F+/35C+ temps
Note that 35 C is below normal body temperature. 100F ~= 37.8 C. I used to donate plasma once a month back when I lived in the U.S. (I'm fortunate enough to not have cytomegalo virus, so newborns, chemo patients, HIV patients, etc. can receive my blood.) My body temperature for my pre-donation check-up was typically 35.8C/96.4F.
"Of Quinine And Chloroquine" by Willis Eschenbach / https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/11/of-quinine-and-chloro...
I sincerely hope the end is in sight!
Now I'm intrigued. What do anti-malarials do to healthy people? Does anyone take them recreationally to experience this effect, the way they do other "weird downers" like mescaline/DMT/salvinorin/etc? Or is the psychotropic effect of the drug predicated on actually having malaria?
During your waking hours, nothing feels amiss at all. Keep in mind too that the dosing is once a week. It took a week or two for the effects to start for me, and they persisted for almost a month after I was home. Unlike reports from the various psychedelics you listed, I felt absolutely no euphoria or “spiritual awakening” from any of it; I just woke up every morning and thought “wow, that was fucked up!”
It'd be interesting to compare to the dreams of people who take the drug without travelling, e.g. medical staff native to malarial regions, who take it as a prophylactic when interacting with malaria-infected patients.
I can only speak to my own experiences, but while I have observed the phenomenon you describe in preparation for travel/while travelling, Chloroquine dreams were waaaaay more dramatic than anything I've experienced with other travel. I forget what the exact timeline was, but I think I started taking them about a month before departing, and the dreams started about two weeks before departing, and stayed pretty much constant until a few weeks after I'd been home and stopped taking the pills.
The area I was visiting was not so different from other places I had visited or worked, just with a greater chance of maleria and lower chance of getting quick treatment.
It is nothing like a psychedelic trip for me.
If you want to try and see if you get weird/strong dreams there are a lot of anecdotes around the supplement ZMA. It is just anecdotes but I've seen threads started on many different training forums from newbies asking about it.
As you see, not too much data but it is still something. From the reports, it doesn't look like there is recreative potential. It doesn't hurt to look but the general idea is that if a strong psychoactive is not heavily controlled/illegal, the effects are usually nothing but unpleasant.
However.. Some of the alternative drugs have very serious warnings that if you have any history of mental illness you probably shouldn't take them. Mefloquine is particularly prone to this I think and the symptoms sound like what the OP described (insomnia, vivid dreams, etc). You shouldn't have that with doxycycline, but it can make you photosensitive which isn't ideal in Africa.
Seriously, don't get malaria if you can help it. Your bones hurt from the inside out while you lay in a pool of your own sweat, crawling to the toilet every hour or two because of oscillating vomiting and diarrhea. Since you're most likely in a developing country, air conditioning is usually out of the question (you're shivering in the 100F+/35C+ temps anyways from the fever). The drugs, if you're lucky, only give you the most vivid and disconcerting dreams you've ever had (if you're unlucky, which 50% of people are, they're the most horrifying night terrors you can imagine).
The good news is it's highly treatable. The bad news is that at ~$3 for a round of treatment it's prohibitively expensive if you're only making $2/day and have a family to support.
We only got rid of it here in the US because of DDT. Malaria was endemic in the South (and parts of the North in the summer) until the mid-20th century.