How to prevent diseases when you are traveling especially from malaria in Africa?
This is one thing that comes together, there are still millions of people dying from Malaria all over the world but most of them in Africa. Of course we have to deal with that as well, we are now on total 20 months in Africa and in most of the countries there is a serious threat of malaria. So how do we prevent against malaria?
We are so long in the malaria risk areas and there is no vaccination against malaria. But there are medicines who protect you against malaria like malarone, chloroquine and doxycline. Again there is a but, they are not protecting you for a 100% and for long term use they can seriously damage you body and some of them can have side effects. I’m not a doctor so cannot explain all the medicines in detail, so I’m not going to try that.
We decided to not use anything against malaria, but that doesn’t mean we don’t take care of not getting it. This is what we do and are on our opinion the most important things to do.
– Socks, the mosquitos love your ankles.
– Long sleeve shirt and pants, now most of your body is covered. We know that it is not easy to wear them when the temperature around 30-40 degrees especially after ride motorcycle all day under the sun. But it is the way protect ourself from malaria.
– Mosquito spray with deet, we even put this on our clothes to protect. We have been using 70% deet on it. This doesn’t protect you only from mosquitos and malaria it is one of the thing carry with you and help how to prevent diseases because we have more fly or animals can bite on the nature.
– Eat garlic, this is not a proven method but garlic is working like a antibiotic.
– If we camp in a place with a lot of mosquitos we spray our inside tent before go to sleep.
This is the most you can do and it works for us, we didn’t get malaria.( still we have three more countries in Africa 🙂 ) We have been traveling with people using medicine and still got malaria. You just cannot protect yourself 100% so it’s a matter of luck, you can just prepare yourself against it. We do carry malarone with us as we can use it as a anti malaria medicine if we do get malaria, this way we can get to a place to treat us against it.
If we feel sick and our temperature is high we test ourselves, you can do this everywhere in Africa for a small price.
Important note! If you do get malaria in Africa or elsewhere in the world, treat yourself against it in the country where you are, don’t fly to your home country as they might not know what to do.
Also safety is an other issue.
We made a short video for our Africa journey, roads, life… We hope that you like to watch :
FS
