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[Not more symptoms with mefloquine use than with other drugs in malaria prophylaxis]
B A Wolters1, T Bosje, M J Luinstra-Passchier
1Gemeenschappelijke Gezondheidsdienst Groningen Stad en Ommelanden.
Objective:
To investigate the prevalence of health problems and compliance with respect to malaria prophylaxis of travellers to the (sub)tropics.
Setting:
Travel department of the Public Health Care Centre Groningen, the Netherlands.
Design:
Retrospective follow-up study.
Methods:
A questionnaire was sent out to 450 visitors to the Public Health Care Centre. They had stayed in the (sub)tropics for at most three months. Two subgroups used malaria prophylaxis (mefloquine or proguanil/proguanil-chloroquine): the control group used no prophylaxis.
Results:
40% of the 321 responders reported health problems during their stay in the (sub)tropics. Users of proguanil (with or without concurrent chloroquine prophylaxis) reported significantly more health problems (55%). Symptoms reported most frequently were vomiting and diarrhoea. Insomnia and neuropsychiatric disorders were reported only rarely (1%) and these complaints were equally distributed over the prophylaxis subgroups. The reported compliance with chemoprophylaxis was 77%.
Conclusions:
The frequently reported psychiatric complaints during use of mefloquine were not confirmed by this study. The compliance with malaria prophylaxis in this study was similar to that in other studies.