Malaria, a travel health problem in the maritime community

Three to five hundred million cases of malaria occur annually, causing over one to two million deaths. Malaria is one of the leading causes of fever, resulting from travel in tropical or subtropical countries. That risk is very high, especially for sailors. By the nature of their job they cannot avoid malarial regions and generally suffer from the lack of medical help aboard, insufficient knowledge of preventive measures, and lack of up-to-date information about chloroquine resistant areas.

Retrospective analysis embraced all cases of malaria among seafarers employed in the years 1990-1993 by the Croatian sea carrier Losinjska Plovidba, and cases treated at the Clinic for Infectious Diseases, Rijeka, in the same period.

In that period, among seafarers treated in our Port Health Office there were registered 23 cases of malaria; 19 cases among sailors and 4 among tourists, all of them aboard merchant ships. Among seafarers treated in the Clinic for Infectious Diseases from 1990-1993 there were 13 malaria patients, 12 of them sailors and 1 tourist.

The aim of this work is to study the morbidity of malaria on board ships owned by the Croatian shipping company Losinjska Plovidba in the 4-year period 1990-1993 and point to the lack of a health system for their health protection. It can be concluded that the severity of malaria, the number of complications, the period of disablement for work, permanent health damage in a marked number of young persons on duty abroad, all clearly demonstrate the individual and social costs of this disease in Croatia and the maritime community worldwide.