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Still Using Larium!

Posted on 1st September 2015

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This report, from the BBC, is one of several recent stories about Larium.

The writer describes his experiences from 1998, but the side-effects of Larium were already very well known in 1995, when I was prescribed it for a business trip to French Guiana. I and a group of people went to Kourou for acceptance testing of our project for the ESA. Like in parts of East Africa, parts of South America also have drug resistant malaria, and Larium was the only option. In the end, I think that no-one in my group took their Larium, because of the side-effects, some of which can be very long-term, or even permanent; we decided to risk it (mostly we were indoors, and lots of insect repellent was used).

1995 is now 20 years ago, and the British Army is still using Larium (according to this web-site, it was introduced during the Vietnam war, which ended in 1975). It makes me wonder how effective our forces are when operating in malarial zones.

Admittedly, there hasn't really been much progress in anti-malarials since Larium was introduced, so in some scenarios it is a choice between Larium and nothing. Nevertheless, it seems like the military continue to treat our soldiers like cattle, or guinea pigs; things haven't really improved since the days of agent orange, or the deliberate exposure of servicemen, after the second world war, to nuclear fallout.

The situation with anti-malarial drugs is one of the big problems in medicine today. Malaria seems harder to fight than HIV, and the lack of effective drugs ranks with the growth in drug resistant bacteria (if we discount self-inflicted life-style and diet-related problems like obesity and heart disease).