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GUIDE TO MALARIA 12-8-05
So, you get yourself involved in writing a medical column on footballer's injuries. What are the chances of your third article being about bloody malaria? About the same as Newcastle getting a game at the Bernabau this season or Messrs Shearer and Souness getting Christmas cards saying, "Best wishes for the New Year Boyo. All my love Craigy B".
But no, whoever does the medicals at Rockliffe somehow missed the fact that the Yak was shaking and sweating like a shitting Radcliffe and popping monstrous great horse pills. Clearly someone doesn't know the question "any other medical problems I should know about?"
Why Not Just Tell Us What It Is?
Malaria comes from the Italian mal meaning bad and aria meaning air. So bad air and if we follow the same logic, Massimo Maccarone suffers from anaria meaning no soddin' 'air at all. Badoom... Tish.
This was because the Romans believed that malaria was spread by bad air. Modern thought now shows it to be carried by the anopheles mosquito, or possibly by gypsies if the Daily Mail is to be believed.
However, it is only the female mosquito that is the blood-sucking parasite considered to be among the top three killers on the planet. The male on the other hand lives mainly on water melon, doesn't bite people, gives a lot of money to cancer research, helps little old ladies across the road and will frequently take a whole day out of its short life to help a little lost kitten find its mother. Take from this whatever inference you see fit when considering the battle of the sexes.
When going around biting folk willy-nilly, this mosquito can often suck up a load of blood from someone already infected with malaria which it can then pass on to someone else, thus propagating the disease. The disease itself is caused by plasmodium. A genus of simple single celled protozoan parasites, and I for one do not intend to mention Ian Elliot the football agent in this sentence as that would be a dreadful non sequitur.
There are four species of plasmodium, the most dangerous being p. falciparum. The other three are named after the founder members of Genesis or the Three Degrees or something like that. I can't remember, stop bothering me.
It's certainly the only one that's known to be fatal. The others are much milder with symptoms ranging from night sweats to a fondness for small yappy dogs to the purchase of flamboyant hats.
So what does Falciparum do if it's so hard?
Basically this parasite floats around in your red blood cells until you are bitten by a vicious, evil, bra-burning mosquito. Whilst in the insects gut it undergoes a further stage of the maturation process, in the same way that caterpillars pupate or a mackem watches his first relegation battle, so that it is ready to invade when the mosquito bites the next person.
The text books generally say an uninfected person, however I'm pretty sure that protozoan parasites don't have dance cards. "Sorry this human host is taken kindly. Find your own." And so etiquette of infection is not generally an issue.
Once into a new victim, what your plasmodia want to do more than anything in the whole world, even more than go to Starbucks, is reproduce. They just want to make more little parasites and whether they do this by shagging or just splitting down the middle to produce two identical little chav protozoans, they don't care. Just so long as there are more of the little fuckers polluting the planet, they are happy.
Clearly a lesser man than myself would try analogising plasmodium to Geordies at this point, but to do this would be wrong. Skunks can't reproduce by splitting down the middle and to suggest that they can is just being facetious and judgemental.
Geordies reproduce by forming spores. And shagging obviously, but not shagging as we know it with kissing and pleasure and knowing the other person's name and that. Geordie sex is more akin to breaking wind. Smelly, noisy, over in seconds and only really pleasurable for one person if they're really lucky and don't end up just staining their underpants.
This reproduction initially starts in the liver and once underway happens in the liver, in red blood cells, alleyways out the back of nightclubs, school fields... basically the romance is lost and reproduction continues at a ridiculous pace with little regard for support networks. Clearly the Geordie simile isn't feeling that stretched just yet.
Unfortunately, all this reproduction occurs in cells within the human body, mainly liver cells or red blood cells. Here the Geordie comparison starts to fall apart a bit because when these cells start to fill up with plasmodium's prolific protozoan progeny instead of shipping off the kids to a caravan in South Shields with their Granny, the cells have to accommodate the parasites instead. This causes the cells to initially become misshapen and eventually burst.
The problem is that when liver cells burst they stop working, funnily enough. If lots of them burst then that isn't particularly good news for the liver as it's made up of these liver cells. Not enough liver cells means the liver don't work so well. Gosh, this medicine lark is a bit tricky isn't it. So your punter ends up with jaundice and then liver failure.
Red blood cells also tend not to work so well when they burst either. Enough burst and you end up with anaemia and even more jaundice. The thing about red blood cells is that they have to move smoothly along blood vessels, and oddly shaped cells just don't do the job properly and end up slowing down or cutting off the blood supply to organs. The problem is that organs that don't get enough blood stop working. So malaria can cause multiple organ failure.
So not that funny then?
It has to be said, not really and milking an awful lot of laughs out of malaria's complications is gonna stretch things a little bit. So if you didn't find the first half funny you might as well give up now.
Falciparum malaria can cause liver failure and anaemia, as mentioned above. By effecting the blood flow to the brain it can cause fits and coma. Falciparum malaria causes Blackwater fever, a condition where so many blood cells burst that you end up pissing out most of your haemaglobin, which in turn buggers your kidneys.
So all in all, less fun than a wet Sunday morning down the South Gare. It kills roughly three and a half million people a year, a million of which are kids, which is roughly one in every ten child deaths in the third world. By comparison, it kills about a dozen people in the UK each year.
Thanks Vits you've cheered me right up.
Try this for a consolation then. On 3rd December its World Swim for Malaria day, which is like a world-wide sponsored swim in aid of erm, malaria. There isn't a swim planned in the North East at the time of writing but full details can be found on the official website www.worldswimformalaria.com.
Right you preachy get, finish with a couple of jokes or I'll smash your face in.
Due to the increase in air travel, the new phenomenomenomenomenon of airport malaria has arisen. This is where an infected mosquito rides a jumbo jet halfway across the world, gets off the plane jet-lagged and hungry and just starts biting anyone who it comes across.
So people who live and work around the airport get infected with the same symptoms as normal malaria but with the added bonus of spending one pound bloody thirty on a can of coke.
Recent evidence, mainly DNA evidence - and you thought that was only good for mopping up US president of A's population paste - has shown that the fall of the Roman empire was probably largely due to malaria.
So you know what that means kiddies. It's bring along a mosquito day when we play at Stamford Bridge. You can also legitimately get tanked up on gin - a source of the anti-malarial drug quinine - if you're going to the match and you know the Yak's in the squad. Just tell the arresting officer it was on doctor's orders.
Dr Vits is a real doctor, and may have inadvertently let slip why at some point during this article, sorry.
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