Ailing US students leave Ghana early
But some of the students got an exposure of an unexpected kind when eight of the 17 fell ill with malaria-like symptoms during an August trip. The outbreak prompted the UW to cut the trip short by a week and charter a plane to ferry the stricken students out of Ghana's rural upper west region.
Their abrupt return apparently is the first time the UW prematurely shut down a study-abroad trip. Future visits to Ghana are on hold for now � for unrelated reasons, UW says.
The eight ill students flew to Accra, the capital, on a chartered flight paid by the UW's travel insurance, said Anand Yang, director of the UW's Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. They then caught commercial flights to Seattle.
The remaining nine students opted to finish their stay in Ghana, learning about the country's cultural, health and economic -development programs.
Ghana is a high-risk area for malaria, a mosquito-borne disease. Ghanaian doctors diagnosed the students with malaria, but subsequent tests at UW showed that was not the cause of their illness. The UW did not release the students' names. They all have recovered but are still being tested to determine the cause of their illness, Yang says.
False-positive tests for malaria are not uncommon in less-developed nations. Many other conditions can produce malarialike symptoms, such as fever, chills, vomiting. Gastroenteritis, which is caused by contaminated water or food, is one example.
The incident may push the UW to consider more carefully just how far to let students venture to remote parts of developing countries, Yang said.
Clean water, familiar foods and other comforts can grow scarcer the farther travelers venture from urban areas, Yang said.
"These are very difficult conditions for middle-class Americans to get into," Yang said.
I wonder if this is the same (or a related) 5-week program that I participated in, in the summer of 2001 thru the University of Kansas Study Abroad Program. Students from other schools (University of Oregon was one) went with KU students for a 5-week journalism program.
I was the only one to get Malaria out of the entire group. And from what I've been told, the only student in KU Study Abroad history to contract malaria on one of these trips. My professor didn't believe that I was as sick as I said I was, or as sick as I looked, and I wasn't diagnosed for 2 1/2 weeks after showing initial symptoms. Needless to say, I didn't get to go home.
Other than being dilapidated by malaria and thinking I might die without ever seeing my homeland again, it was a good experience.
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