Carthage, Tunisia

My son in law in Europe who is married to my oldest daughter in Europe was sent to Carthage, Tunisia on Business by his company. He told me about going to a museum and seeing ancient Phoenician things there while he was there. He also saw roaming wild dogs which are also common in India when I went there in 1985 and 1986 with my family then.

Then when he got on the plane he started having the shakes and barely made it back to Europe and then found out that he had Dysentary and Covid at the same time. Luckily, he is young enough to likely survive both these things.

I was telling him that basically if you go anywhere from the Middle East all the way east of there to about Thailand you have to worry about stuff like this. So, if you go any of these places from the Middle East to about Thailand or further east than this you need to be careful of not dying from things like Malaria (which my best friend almost died from in India and Pakistan) or Giardia (which you get from bad water or feces in the dust where you are traveling). I and most of my family got this towards the end of our 4 months in Thailand, India and Nepal from December 1985 until April of 1986. It took us all about 6 months for the Giardia to slough off. When I returned from Nepal in April of 1986 through Bangkok Thailand I could see black spots before my eyes. Then we went to a Foreign disease specialist who told us that since we had survived to get home to the U.S. Mainland we would likely be eventually okay as it sloughed off without medication. She said that she didn't want to give medicines against giardia to our children because it might destroy their livers and it wouldn't help us much either so it was better to just let the giardia of Asia slough off. She said that  though there is American Giardia it is less potentially fatal than Asian giardia. So, we all recovered except that my youngest son also somehow got lice in Asia too so we shaved his head because he was only 10 and likely wouldn't use a lice comb every day for months to get rid of them also.

So, the point is if you go anywhere between the Middle East and Thailand, the biggest threat to your survival is not the people there but things like dysentery, giardia, Malaria and things like this.

So, if you are going to visit these areas it is hard to be wise enough in all ways to survive these experiences.

Yes. you can survive all these kinds of experiences if you are young enough to survive them when they happen. 

But, going to these places after you are about 40 or 50 is very iffy at best unless you are very rigorous in your preparations to survive these places.

Surviving these areas is no easy things. I found this out with my family the hard way. So, if you travel to these areas of the world or many others you must be very mentally and physically prepared to survive these places in every way. 

Around 2010 a nurse who studied aryuvedic medicine here in the U.S. said becoming hypothyroid is one of the potential things you can get from having giardia because the protozoa attack your intestines trying to get the gluten in your diet which they like which in the long run can make you hypothyroid.

It could have also been part of the reason I got a heart virus in 1998 because my hypothyroid condition wasn't discovered until 2006 and by then I believed I likely was going to die soon. But, by the Grace of God my physical trainer who also was hypothyroid told me that she thought that's what was wrong with me because of my symptoms and since taking armour thyroid medicine since 2006 I'm still doing fine in 2025 by the Grace of God.

So, if you travel the world it can be amazing and wonderful sort of like going to another planet. Just try to make sure you don't get something potentially fatal while you are having fun traveling the world.