Malaria prevention

No problem with anything but paragraph #4. Mosquito behavior is evolving (bloody smart critters) so malarial mosquitoes are hunting in the daytime now as well..

Explained about day time mosquitos being the source of Dengue and night time mosquitos being the cause of Malaria

Ah...my zoology lessons in school come back to me. Malaria is caused by the anopheles mosquito (with a black and white striped body if you ever let it get close enough to see it), which is a largely nocturnal and dengue by the Aedes mosquito (all gray body) which is largely diurnal. Of course, you do know that only the female mosquito bites.

I love the animal kingdom :-) The men are pretty, titivate to attract the opposite sex, and the women fight and bite.

@ 17 I would never go to india without (hep A and B, tetanus, typhoid, polio booster,)...doxycycline..deet..a regimen of cipro for TD+ +Despite ..everything, India is just too filthy

I am not being facetious but need to ask, did you also carry Prozac with you as a pick me up from all the depressing sights which India also presents and the sheer difficulty of travelling around?

MY doctor said Cipro is not as good for India as Azithromycin. She didn't explain, just said it was the "drug of choice" now.

Anyway, I guess I'm going with a zillion pills. What I don't use in India will serve me well in Guatemala in February.

This thread has links to recent research re malaria in India.

Gemcap, you are being facetious, but also showing a sense of humor. No, I didn't need any prozac in India. I was too busy figuring out all the madcap activity, bargaining with vendors who smile because even they know their first offers are usually ridiculous, making up silly songs about riding in buses and driving on India's roads, fighting with obnoxious French tourists, chatting with storekeepers over cups of chai, fantasizing about the beef dishes I would like to make with the two cows who head butted me in Jaisalmer, getting lost in the alleys of Varanasi, exploring castles, markets, forts, deserts, beaches, mountains and crazy cities; leaving various cities either one day before, or one day after terrorist attacks, and not worrying as much as others might because I did take basic health precautions in a very dirty country. The depressing sights are there - yes - but I could not dwell on them, and I did not have the resources, money or governmental support to do much about them.

Great response :-). You seem to have really had a great time during your travels.

I leave today - although it will take me a week to get to Delhi. Thank you everyone for your insightful help on this thread.

I'm armed with 25 Malarone pills - to start the day before I got to Goa and a week after I leave India. Insurance. I have all sorts of anti-diarrhea stuff, including having taken a dose of Dukoral. I can't do anything more, and probably have already done too much.

One thing I did read about the Malarone, and this is something else I am thinking of doing perhaps instead of taking them preventatively -- it says if you get Malaria -- to take 4 pills a day for two days as "treatment" while you get yourself to a hospital. I am not ever going to be too far from a major centre, so that's a possibility. I'll discuss it with my Inidian friends.

This trip is a little outside my comfort zone, but I'm as ready as anyone could be --- i hope :-)

Thanks again.

Patty

Patty, good luck with your trip, stay healthy and safe. Look forward to reports on the trip.

buen viaje.

Janet

I've lived in India a total of 5 years over the past 30 (started off as a hippie, ended up a professor of Indian religions); sometimes I took anti-malarials (chloroquine in the old days) and sometimes I didn't. I'm currently spending 3 months in a village in S. Karnataka, and have been taking Mefloquine (my wife is not). Something to be aware of with this is that a side effect (in rare [?] cases) is that one can become depressed and even suicidal (I'm not making this up--read the fine print). About ten years ago I was living in Nepal, and a girl I met actually became pretty psychotic, and indeed suicidal, on the stuff. I had a bout of some pretty wierd ideation a couple of weeks ago, but it has passed--not sure if it was the drug or just the craziness of the environment bringing out my innate looniness. Anyway, my feeling is that it is a crapshoot whether you take it or not. (The alternative, antibiotics, is fine as long as you don't go out in the sun--good luck!)

I agree with previous writers who are averse to taking meds unnecessarily (count me among them), but I read the local papers, and a lot of people contract and die from malaria in South Asia. The WHO just came out with a study that estimates the number is three times previous estimates, which were already pretty horrific. My strategy on this trip was better safe than sorry, but next time I might go the other way.

A question for others out there: How is that a country that is booming in IT can't get it together to install screens on hotel room windows? (I'm talking Rs 800-1000/night, not the dives I stayed in back in the day.) Next time I come to India I'm bringing my own mosquito net.