Clinical cases

Above is a picture of a middle age lady who presented with foot drop. As you can see she has some skin lesions which was treated for fungal infection but never got better. She has leprosy. She took 3 months medication but never came back for more. Then she came back again only because her husband was very sick. Now the whole family is on TB medication. Her husband has 2-3 wives. That is quite common to find a man having several wives. One patient I had was the 7th wife.


Above is a closeup picture of a 10 year old girl who has had years of scabies. It seemed like almost all the patients have scabies. You know in GP land in London, a small skin lesion comes up and everyone jumps up and down, but here it's so common that if you don't have any skin lesion then you're abnormal. I was abnormal when I arrive but now I've got all these mosquito bites, and I think there is a bed bug in the bed. Now I also developed all these bites on my trunk. I was in denial and thought initially it was just mosquitoes that somehow found it's way on my abdomen and back but now every morning I get more bites on my body so I know it's either scabies or some other bed bug. Now I look like any other person in PNG. I've gotten over very quickly on examining someone with scabies. Now I can even examine a hairy smelly man's armpit without wearing gloves. I'm very proud of myself for that actually. Sometimes there is just no gloves lying around.


The above picture shows two brothers. One is 3 years old and the other is 5 months old. You could probably figure out which is the sick one. Despite being breast fed and it seemed like he is always hungrily breast feeding, and also feeding additional food, he is still not gaining weight. Oh and of course he is on TB meds as well and if it's TB he should be putting one weight by now. Next we're going to counsel mom and get permission to do an HIV test to see if that is cause why he is not putting any weight despite all the feeding.