Dusk was dropping over Marina Nov. 2 as Ken Morris came home to find his house on fire.
As he entered through the garage he could see a haze pushing from room to room, and down the hall toward him.
His wife was out, so his first instinct was to grab his beloved Labradors – the chocolate (Kahlua) and yellow (Grizzly) that accompany him on frequent hunting trips – and get them outside.
The next was to find the source of the smoke. “The whole house is full of it,” he says. “The hallway, the living room. I’m running in bedrooms trying to find the fire, and I can’t.”
He double checked the kitchen, flipping on the light. Then it hit him. He had checked every room. And he didn’t smell anything burning. As he sat there staring into the kitchen, the haze gradually lifted.
“There’s something seriously wrong with me,” he remembers thinking. “I’m losing it.”
He had suffered through fevers that reached 103 degrees and cold sweat shivering episodes that lasted a half hour for several days, but until then he thought he was fighting off the flu.
He had managed to put off his wife Beverly’s urgings to get medical care. As she puts it: “He told me, ‘It’s the flu! What can the doctor do that I can’t?’”
When he realized he was hallucinating he was less cavalier.
Both Doctors on Duty and his primary care doctor ordered tests. An X-ray ruled out pneumonia. Morris says his physician, Dr. Robert Fernandez of PrimeCare, forwarded the results to a friend with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Blood tests pointed to malaria.
The thing about that: Malaria doesn’t happen in Monterey County. At least not to anyone who hasn’t been traveling in places like sub-Saharan Africa or India, according to Epidemiologist Kristy Michie of Monterey County Health Department. She counts zero to three cases in the county a year (and zero in 2015 to date), but says those who contracted it had traveled out of country.
“There is no local transmission anywhere in the United States,” she says.
Morris didn’t leave the area, though he did keep close company with mosquitos, the pest that carries the malaria parasite.
The incubation time for malaria—the period between the infective bite and appearance of symptoms—ranges from about seven to 30 days.
Within that window Morris camped under the stars in Fort Hunter Liggett and went duck hunting in Los Banos.
“You can bug-spray down, but there’s nothing that stops those mosquitos,” he says. “They were tearing me up.”
The CDC reports that between 1957 and 2014, 63 outbreaks of locally transmitted mosquito-borne malaria occurred in the U.S., but in those cases, local mosquitoes become infected by biting people carrying malaria parasites from places where it commonly occurs.
Fernandez put Morris on antibiotics and other meds. As this goes to press, Morris, who runs a landscaping business, says he’s “feeling 95-percent [normal].”
And he’s 100-percent sure this won’t affect his affinity for the outdoors.
“It’s a lifestyle,” he says. “Now that I’m all better I go back to my same M.O.”