Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance by Kenneth Kamler
Authors: Kenneth Kamler
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into a dry tent.
The camp was a research station for a number of different projects. The primary objective was to study the social behavior of crocodiles. Every night, we caught them in the lake and brought them to camp, where we did all those things Antonio found so perplexing. After a while we would begin to catch the same animals over and over, giving us an idea of the total population and whether they lived individually, in pairs, or in groups, and whether or not they were territorial. Meanwhile, entomologists were climbing trees to gain access to termite nests, to study not the termites but the termitophiles, tiny insects that live within termite colonies; botanists were dragging the lake with sieves to trap plankton; and biologists were doing research on plants, butterflies, snakes, and any serendipitous discoveries that might catch a biologist’s fancy.
My plan was to involve myself in each of the projects by being an eager assistant. My priority, of course, would always be to provide medical care whenever necessary, but if everyone stayed fairly healthy,I knew I could learn a lot about the jungle. And if not, I would learn a lot about jungle diseases.
Our camp was a pinhole in a continent-wide entanglement of plants and animals that wove themselves into a tight green fabric covering half of South America. Of the thousands of hidden lakes in this rain forest, we had set up on the shore of this one, called Zancudo Cocha, because we had heard it was infested with crocodiles. I didn’t learn until after I arrived that in the local dialect
Zancudo Cocha
means “Lake of the Malaria Mosquito”—a jungle menace far more deadly than crocodiles, and the single biggest reason, among many big reasons, why so few people live in the Amazon.
Malaria has killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide over the course of history. Ancient Romans believed the god Febris inflicted it, and the remnant of that idea survives to this day as the word
fever.
Italians gave it its name when they noted that it seemed to come from the bad air, or
mal aria,
around swamps. The cause of the disease is actually a denizen of the swamp, the anopheles mosquito. After mating, a pregnant female gets hungry for protein to make her eggs. She seeks out warm-blooded, protein-rich targets by sensing the skin odors of animals and humans as well as by honing in on the carbon dioxide in their exhaled air. After landing, she makes test holes with her needle-sharp nose until she hits a blood vessel. Then she literally spits in the wound, injecting saliva, which increases blood flow by widening the vessel and preventing clot formation. The female anopheles has a distinctive style of blood-sucking, lifting her tail high in the air for the two to three minutes it takes to fill her tank. She won’t need a refill unless she gets pregnant again, and until then she’ll go back to feeding on plants—a much safer way for her to eat, since she runs no risk of getting swatted.
The mosquito wreaks havoc not because of the blood she sucks (only about one drop) but because of the dirty needle she uses to withdraw it. The mosquito’s nose acts as a conduit for parasites that flow into the bloodstream along with her saliva. They find a home in the animal or human liver, where they thrive and multiply for the next couple of weeks or months, the incubation period, before breakingout into the bloodstream in full force to ride in red blood cells and destroy them, causing fever and chills. The debris flows into various organs, clogging them up and sometimes causing fatal damage. Even when a malaria victim survives an outbreak, a nest of parasites always remains in the liver. Untreated victims can look forward to periodic outbreaks of the disease for their entire lives.
The appropriateness of the lake’s name was immediately obvious. Of the uncountable number of insects that bit me during my time in the Amazon, however, never did I see a single one lift its tail in the
The camp was a research station for a number of different projects. The primary objective was to study the social behavior of crocodiles. Every night, we caught them in the lake and brought them to camp, where we did all those things Antonio found so perplexing. After a while we would begin to catch the same animals over and over, giving us an idea of the total population and whether they lived individually, in pairs, or in groups, and whether or not they were territorial. Meanwhile, entomologists were climbing trees to gain access to termite nests, to study not the termites but the termitophiles, tiny insects that live within termite colonies; botanists were dragging the lake with sieves to trap plankton; and biologists were doing research on plants, butterflies, snakes, and any serendipitous discoveries that might catch a biologist’s fancy.
My plan was to involve myself in each of the projects by being an eager assistant. My priority, of course, would always be to provide medical care whenever necessary, but if everyone stayed fairly healthy,I knew I could learn a lot about the jungle. And if not, I would learn a lot about jungle diseases.
Our camp was a pinhole in a continent-wide entanglement of plants and animals that wove themselves into a tight green fabric covering half of South America. Of the thousands of hidden lakes in this rain forest, we had set up on the shore of this one, called Zancudo Cocha, because we had heard it was infested with crocodiles. I didn’t learn until after I arrived that in the local dialect
Zancudo Cocha
means “Lake of the Malaria Mosquito”—a jungle menace far more deadly than crocodiles, and the single biggest reason, among many big reasons, why so few people live in the Amazon.
Malaria has killed hundreds of millions of people worldwide over the course of history. Ancient Romans believed the god Febris inflicted it, and the remnant of that idea survives to this day as the word
fever.
Italians gave it its name when they noted that it seemed to come from the bad air, or
mal aria,
around swamps. The cause of the disease is actually a denizen of the swamp, the anopheles mosquito. After mating, a pregnant female gets hungry for protein to make her eggs. She seeks out warm-blooded, protein-rich targets by sensing the skin odors of animals and humans as well as by honing in on the carbon dioxide in their exhaled air. After landing, she makes test holes with her needle-sharp nose until she hits a blood vessel. Then she literally spits in the wound, injecting saliva, which increases blood flow by widening the vessel and preventing clot formation. The female anopheles has a distinctive style of blood-sucking, lifting her tail high in the air for the two to three minutes it takes to fill her tank. She won’t need a refill unless she gets pregnant again, and until then she’ll go back to feeding on plants—a much safer way for her to eat, since she runs no risk of getting swatted.
The mosquito wreaks havoc not because of the blood she sucks (only about one drop) but because of the dirty needle she uses to withdraw it. The mosquito’s nose acts as a conduit for parasites that flow into the bloodstream along with her saliva. They find a home in the animal or human liver, where they thrive and multiply for the next couple of weeks or months, the incubation period, before breakingout into the bloodstream in full force to ride in red blood cells and destroy them, causing fever and chills. The debris flows into various organs, clogging them up and sometimes causing fatal damage. Even when a malaria victim survives an outbreak, a nest of parasites always remains in the liver. Untreated victims can look forward to periodic outbreaks of the disease for their entire lives.
The appropriateness of the lake’s name was immediately obvious. Of the uncountable number of insects that bit me during my time in the Amazon, however, never did I see a single one lift its tail in the
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