Oh, Malaria... or, In Which I am a Bit Catty

I had a bit of an argument with one of the girls on my floor yesterday. Her name is Julia; she is a pre-med student from West Virginia (which just makes me a little bit wary, irregardless of her personality). She rather casually mentioned, as we were discussing our just-finished history exam, that she stopped taking malaria prophylactics about a month after we got here. I couldn't believe my ears. Why in the world would anyone risk getting sick, when prevention is so easy? And she actually did get sick, about a month ago. She got, wait for it.... MALARIA! I never would have guessed *insert sarcastic surprised face here*. She was out of school for a week and felt awful. But then she started talking about how she was actually glad that she had gotten sick. She got to see what people here experience instead of the flu or a winter cold (not that the flu and the common cold don't exist here; they do, malaria just occupies their place in the average Ghanaian's life). She started going on and on about the wording of the Hippocratic Oath...Something about breathing the air that your patients breathe (Side note: I just looked up the traditional Hippocratic Oath and the more modern Declaration of Geneva, which is based on the Hippocratic Oath but modified for modern use, and there is nothing about breathing at all--the doctor's air or the patients'.). She laughed at me for taking my doctor's instructions very, very seriously, even arguing that the prophylactics do more harm to the liver than good in preventing malaria. I was very skeptical of this. She said, grinning at me all the while, that malaria isn't all that dangerous as long as you treat it right away. She was making some rather gross assumptions, inducing: the assumption that everyone knows what malaria feels like, the assumption that malaria presents easily identifiable symptoms,. that the symptoms of malaria are the same for everyone, that everyone is as aware of their bodies as she apparently is, and finally, that she knows better than all of the doctors who prescribed malaria prophylactics as an undergraduate pre-med student. I think that she was full of it. Even if malaria isn't the proverbial  boogeyman of the tropics (and need I remind anyone that West Africa was known as the 'white man's grave' during European colonial rule, before malaria prophylactics were introduced, for a reason?), it is still a serious health risk. My roommate's mother was in the hospital last month for untreated malaria. And she has lived in Ghana all her life and has had malaria before. I really bothers me that Julia was so dismissive of my concern for her health--and for my own. I have not missed a single dose of my malaria prophylaxis since I started taking them in January, and I do not intend to stop now, no matter what she says. I will conclude this rant by adding that Julia also said that she has been drinking tap water here, on occasion. I wish her luck with that, but I wash my hand of anything that may come of it. I think that it is incredibly reckless of her to take risks like that. A few biology classes do not make pre-med students invincible.