Journal #15: Malarial Diagnosis

I read an article today for one of my sources about malarial diagnosis in hospitals. I do not know much about malaria itself other than a few random facts and since I am going to be doing research where the patients will all have malaria, I am going to spend the next week or two focusing on malaria as an illness or disease, social impacts of malaria if any, and Ghanaian health care. Some general information about malaria: malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease. The disease is transmitted by mosquito bites and can be reduced by preventing those bites. The World Health Organization's 2011 world malaria report accounted for 2.23% of deaths worldwide and 90% of those deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Signs and symptoms of malaria include fever, shivering, joint pain, vomiting, jaundice, and convulsions. The classic symptom of malaria is cyclical occurrence of sudden coldness followed by rigor and then fever and sweating lasting four to six hours. There is a very high chance of malarial infection in Ghana thus we will be taking doxycycline, an anti-biotic which we will need to start taking a few days before going to Ghana and continue taking a month after we return. Malaria is a disease/illness...whatever you want to call it which is very unpleasant to experience so I hear.

Because malaria is such a prominent disease in Africa I anticipate it being a very good lens to explore gender and doctor-patient relationships through.

The fact that there is no sure way of preventing it is a huge reason why there are so many cases of malaria throughout the world and especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Mosquito nets and antibiotics are physical preventives but if a mosquito is going to bite its going to bite and then that disease enters your blood stream. It is so simple for the disease to spread and that is why it is so severe. Using malaria as a control for observing differences among how different genders are treated by doctors in their interactions will allow for a good source of measurement when it comes time to analyze my results. Another reason why I am using malaria as a control is because there is a pretty standardized method of treatment and thus, there will not be much variation in ways of diagnosis, there will not be much variation in doctors methods of treatment because they will have been trained to treat this disease in the same way, reasons such as these will help to minimize the number of unforseen factors which could affect the administration of these treatments according to the patient's gender.