Bitter pills

Maeve: I have a chocolate treat every morning!  I don't like honey medicine.

John:\:  As we approach Ghana, where the ship will be staying for most of a week, the topic of malaria prevention starts to seem even less hypothetical than it was in Brazil. Malaria remains a real concern here--our Lonely Planet guidebook says that getting malaria at some point is simply "a fact of life" for many Ghanaians, and a Ghanaian student who is on this leg of the voyage stated last night--"there's a lot of malaria." (This fact alone must account for some not insignificant proportion of the country's poverty--the human cost of widespread malaria is enormous.) We'll be going through a lot of countries where malaria is a threat over the next couple of months--Ghana, India, Vietnam. 

There's no vaccination against malaria, so like just about everyone else on board, we are carrying prescriptions for pills to prevent contracting malaria in case we are bitten by a mosquito, which we started taking just before we reached Brazil. A common topic among the parents of children on board is how to get the kids to take the pills, since there's no such thing (apparently) as a suspension form for the medication.  Most little kids can't swallow a pill, which also taste terrible if you try to chew them. And Maeve has decided that anything that resembles medicine is inherently evil. Everyone is trying to figure out how to get the kids to take the medicine, since if they don't, they really can't leave the ship in a place like Ghana--it's just too risky. Various solvents to get the medicine down have been brought along: maple syrup, lemonade, honey.

The solution for Aidan, who needs to take something called Malaron twice a day, is to grind up the pills and mix it in a lot of honey. We arrived at this after a number of attempts--some successful, but most of them not--to get him used to the process of taking the pill with water.  At least with honey, he can get it down.

This is the "honey medicine" to which Maeve refers above. She can't abide it--either the honey can't sufficiently mask the terrible taste of the medication, or she simply doesn't like honey, but in any case, that was a disaster. Mixing it in milk and having her drink it? No. Mixing it in milk and giving it to her via an oral syringe (which she's often fine with for other kinds of medicine)? Emphatically no (I'm leaving out a lot of details here). 

Chocolate--that's the ticket. And subterfuge--that's key, too. Having failed with everything else, we bought some chocolate syrup in Manaus, and started secretly mixing that with the medicine, and then offering it her as her "chocolate treat," which she gets in the morning. Chocolate is bitter, like the pills, so maybe that helps. Or maybe chocolate syrup is just powerful enough to overcome anything.

One interesting fact learned on this trip is that malaria, which we now think of as a disease of the tropics, is actually a European disease, and was in fact widespread in seventeenth and eighteenth century England. When the fens were drained to create new agricultural land in the southeast of England in the early seventeenth century, it disrupted the tidal patterns that swept mosquitos out to sea. Pools were created that were great breeding grounds for mosquitos, leading to "chills," "agues" and "fevers" (described by, among others, Defoe, who witnessed this when visiting the area) that are now believed to be malaria. 

Now we just have to hope that our supply of chocolate syrup lasts.