Hot News Contest 10 | Health and Disease

Hello fellow steemians and welcome to my post. Happy new year everyone. For this post, I will love to join in the contest organized by @fantvwiki that requests we talk about disease, and our experience with disease.

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A disease is a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of part or all of the body of a living being, and is not the direct impact of an external injury. The disease is also known as a medical condition that is associated with certain clinical symptoms and signs. source

From the definition of a disease above, we can see that a disease negatively affects the metabolic procedures of the entire body, thereby restricting certain functions and activities of daily living. Disease is basically caused by micro organisms which invade the body through any opening of the body (the mouth, ear, eye, nose, gonads or even through an injured part of the body).

Disease is one of the major cause of death worldwide and it is worthy of note that If diseases are left unattended or untreated, it can result in variety of complications, and ultimately death.

Well, as a medical student, I've gotten a good amount of experience with diseases, but the one I will like to share here is a disease that made me skipped class for sometime and that disease I no other than Malaria.
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Malaria is one of the most common but deadly disease in Nigeria due to the huge amount of mosquitoes in Nigeria. Few weeks ago when I was In school, I started having some signs and symptoms of malaria,.which includes

• high fever,
• Loss of appetite,
• Muscle aches,
• Tiredness
• Headache
• Nausea
• and sleepiness

When these clinical manifestations started, I didn't take it seriously, because I thought that my immunity is low due to the work load of being a student, so I reduced the stress and took some multivitamins to rebuild my immunity unknown to me that I'm having malaria. After a week of the vitamins, I decided to stop because I was feeling a kind of better than before.

After stopping the vitamins, all of a sudden, my palm started becoming pale and I started forgetting things when I read. Immediately, I went to my bag and got a test strip for Malaria and it was shocking to see that I had a malaria with one plus. Immediately after the test results, I got my phone and contacted my doctor who prescribed some malaria medications including injections because I was hardly tolerating orally. He prescribed inj Emal dly ³/7, which I injected myself with (PLEASE DON'T TRY IT AT HOME) I also took Paracetamol tds 3/7 and after the 3 days treatment, I took multivitamins to help with my immune system.

This is not the first time of me witnessing malaria, I've witnessed it countless of times and I could tell about some details of it even without being a medical student.

However, malaria is a deadly disease gotten from the bite of a female anopheles mosquito. These mosquito bites sucks out the victims blood, and at the same time, injects the disease causing microorganism called plasmodium, located in the mouth of the mosquito. There are three types of plasmodium parasite that causes malaria and these are:

• Plasmodium vivax

• Plasmodium malariae (the most common type of malaria)

• Plasmodium falciparium

The clinical features of malaria includes:

• Headache
• Fever
• Nausea
• Confusion ( in cerebral malaria i.e when the organism enters the cranial cavity)
• Loss of appetite
• Muscle ache e.t.c

If malaria is left untreated, it could cause the following:

• Cerebral malaria which may lead to psychosis (mental illness)
• Chronic Anaemia (malaria targets the blood cells and destroys them in other to live well In the body of it's host)
• Dehydration
• and ultimately, D-E-A-T-H

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As for the traditional way to overcome malaria, I don't know about it. I am a science student, and I believe that if things (except the existence of God) are not scientifically proven, I don't think it's worthy of note. There may be tons of traditional ways out here to cure malaria, but the implications for these traditional approach, I think will be huge. So, I will suggest that a victim meets his/her doctor for a proper and accurate treatment regimen.

Thank you for reading through my post, I really appreciate you and I hope you learnt something from this post.

I will see you in the next post.