My cousin’s having issues breathing and digesting food? He just got back last week and home on leave, he said he swallowed some sand and is all f’d up now. Or did something not make the news?
I haven’t heard anything like that. I got sick as a dog after I took a dunk trying to cross a canal, but its’ basic third world filthiness vice some sort of industrial poisoning that could be present in a place like Iraq. No one has had any issues other than basic gastrointestinal stuff that happened in connection w/ local water, local food. Hope he gets better.
sounds nasty I got sick there like 8 times only off T rats however.
You cuz should go get checked out asap now or as soon as he gets back in country. Only issue with now is the docs here may mis diagnose him due to there lack of firmiliarety with local and regional ilnesses.
I got sick as hell after an mission in south america in 01 had to stay in portsmith naval medical center for 3 weeks liver quit on me and everything. Only thing that saved me was the doc I had was in south america on an exchange program for 3 years and he fixed me up. No one else had a freeking clue what I had!
He needs a series of Flagyl and Albenza.
Canal dip myself was the sickest I got (same day some of the guys in a different squad had to get medvacced for hypothermia trying to cross the Helmand).
There’s some archaic diseases that can go around at camps - some of our guys up north got Dysentery, so weird stuff can abound. It likely isn’t tied to the moondust as it is to the process of being transported back amongst the masses, and having to cross so many time zones making one immunocompromised.
ciprofloxacin (Cipro) / metronidazole (Flagyl) / zithromax
Zithromax cures all…lol
In 2004 I came down with what they thought was pneumonia but they never really came down with a 100% diagnosis. I woke up one morning in my room, and could barely walk. My O2 levels were in the mid 80’s. I got medivaced based on the division surgeons recommendation, and went to Germany for a week. I was stationed there so my unit came and got me. Somehow that whole episode never ended up in my medical file but I was on IV drip antibiotics for 2 weeks, and was in ICU for one week next to people with GSW’s, and frag wounds.
This was at BIAP, and at the time I was on constant convoys.
He went to the hospital today, he was supposed to call me when he got home. I’m guessing they took blood and won’t know anything for a couple days.
Gamma 8 shots were the norm when I served. 1 in each cheek before deployment then 1 every 90 days for booster. MMM peanut butter in the ass always brings a smile to my face, lol especially since I was the “doc”, well not really after having to administer a few hundred. But anyways those help and the cipro and flagyl were always norm, good stuff. Third world disease is common, same type symptoms when some poor schmuck fell into shit river in “Pubic Bay”(Subic), a nice confinement and multiple shots and pills to square them away.
I always get a persistent cough when I go to Afghanistan. But other than that, I’m healthier there than just about anywhere else. Just came from Taji, Iraq, and the entire time I was there, I had a persistent headache. The day I left for the IZ, headache disappeared.
Environmental influences are everywhere.
To OP:
I have traveled the entire US, and lived in multiple eco systems. My body thrives best in a desert climate, and I know this from experience. I have gotten horribly ill while traveling to Texas (Bay Town). Every year I went I would get sick for at least a month afterwards. Had a hard time in the Pacific Northwest too. My fiance is having a hard time adapting to the North East.
Your immune system works by developing anti bodies to various ailments and it does this through exposure to those ailments. Sometimes environmental factors (such as Malaria) prove fatal to human inhabitants, and through the process of natural selection those individuals that survive develope various adaptations that help them cope with said ailment (in the case of Malaria that adaptation is Sickle Cell Anemia). Of course such changes don’t happen over night, and baring modern medicine, also don’t happen within one generation.
When you consider that we hop around the globe like it is nobody’s business these days, it makes sense that your cousin is sick. He traveled half way around the planet to an environment his immune system had no ability to deal with.
While in Lithuania I developed a persistent cough. In Estonia, it was trouble breathing due to humidity. Poland kicked my ass digestively. And believe it or not I was fine in Argentina (minus the particulate pollution).
In 2006 my father (an ex-pat that works for a major trans national) picked up a bug (virus they think) that caused his heart to speed up, then slow down, speed up, then slow down. He was hospitalized off and on for weeks at a time. At first they thought it was his life style, then it stopped abruptly, thus the diagnosis of it being a possible virus. He almost lost his job because of it, due to the fact that he’s a trained first responder, and thus this made him a liability to his environment. Then it went away. Where did he pick this bug up? Could have been six different countries and five different U.S. states (all of which he had been in in the last two years). Did he blame his company? Nope. Could he have sued his company for the ailment? Maybe. Did he want to sue his company? Nope. It was his choice to do the job he did, and therefore it was his problem to deal with. He signed up, he got sick, he knew the risks.
Such is the reality of living in a trans continental world.
Hope your cousin gets better.
+1 to above.
I do best in the desert with DRY air. Humidity makes me feel like crap, my skin feels like its crawling, etc. But I grew up in soCal where it was always dry, and 10" of rain a year was good.
Here in CenTx I get sore throats a lot, my allergies go nuts for months during the spring (just now not getting them since about march). I get colds a lot more here aside from the random sore throat. My sinuses always feel clogged. Thinking about getting a dehumidifier for the house.
Have to agree with Belmont. I grew up in L.A. and loved my smog. Ever since moving to Pac. NW I have had allergies up the kazoo. I hate the environment too much green and trees. Give me concrete and steel any day. All that aside, it is nice here, I guess my body runs better in more arid, polluted environment.
I left the Pac. NW after 5 years because I couldn’t handle it any more. My doctor actually told me that maybe I should move. I was so allergic to that part of the country I reached the limit on annual steroid shots that my doctor was willing to give without health risks.
Damn bro that sucks. I am not quite that bad yet. Although I spend enough on Loratadine at Costco o put the store mgr kids through college. If it gets really bad I zone out with 4 Benadryl and ignore life for awhile.
Yea man it was bad. I literally had hippies walk up to me with a thumbs up cause my eyes were so red… 
I was jacking benadryl on top of Clariton (before the generic hit the shelfs) and taking a steroid inhaler. Plus the shot once a year. F@cking miserable. It sucks too cause I love Oregon, my soon to be wife (July 17th) is from Oregon, and we have a family farm that may one day be ours in Oregon. Thankfully she is not from the valley, or the coastal region and is more Eastern though. I can tolerate it there.
I take Zertec, and started taking it in Germany. Really green humid areas get to me. Prefer temperate or desert environments so theres not much vegetation to get to me.
I was stationed at Ft. Lewis before moving here, and I remember all the pine pollen for a few weeks. Would be huge clouds of it coming off the trees. Here we get cedar pollen and a couple others.
OK. You guys are starting to make me re-think about my willingness to deploy to A-Stan. :eek:
Deploying anywhere pretty much means foreign organisms, diseases, viruses, etc. Just part of the “experience” I guess…
Aside from getting sick that one time I mentioned earlier I only had gastro issues but that was because we were eating local food half the time. We had Army cooks supplemented with locals, and a good portion of the time the food was unedible due to be undercooked, just nasty, repetitive, etc. We’d pay our terps to go get us kabobs and these little sugary desert roll things. Better food than our own guys were feeding us but we got the shits like every 3rd day from it.
Our IA guys tried to get us to eat at their DFAC, and I gagged when I saw the food. Their meat was basically scraps from animals. Knee joints with tendons and the actual joint still there. We just drank chai tea with them instead…
Oh and stay out of standing water. That shit (literally) can easily kill you or at least give you life long diseases.
The good old days of dysentary and night sweats. Oh how I miss it. Personally I would stick with omelet with ham every day forever that eat some of the food they attempted to serve us. Just be thankful your not going to Korea where their veggie gardens use human fecal matter as soil.