By Dr Susan Harris Rimmer, Advocacy Manager for the Australian Council for International Development
I caught malaria in 1996. I was in a refugee camp called Dadaab on the Kenyan-Somali border, which is still there and still one of the saddest places on earth. I was a wide-eyed law student, desperate to work on refugee and human rights issues, so I took a loan and went to help the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kenya as an intern.
Like all Westerners in the camp, I did all the right things, took the anti-malarial drugs, slept under a net, and used insect spray every day. But as any refugee will tell you, most outsiders to Dabaab will sooner or later get a new drug-resistant strain of malaria due to their lack of immunity and I got bitten on my foot.
The diagnosis was quick, the treatment was quinine and bed rest. I can attest that this is a very scary disease to experience. The effect on my life was significant but manageable. I had several relapses back in Australia and met most of Australia’s tropical disease specialists. It took two years to fully recover.
