'I thought I had a hangover - it turned out to be a killer infection'
A young British backpacker revealed how her post-party hangover, after a night on the town, turned out to be a deadly infectious disease.
Alysha Pyrgotis, 27, said she thought she was going to die after catching typhoid while on a remote Indonesian party island, called Gili Trawangan, in June. The backpacker, from Bradford, said she was left vomiting and with "extreme diarrhoea" before realising she caught a disease that kills nearly 100,000 people every year. Alysha revealed why she was particularly unlucky to have fallen ill on that remote party island and why she "had to leave the country soon".
She said: "I was bed bound, in a lot of pain with my muscles and my bones. I was a bit delirious. I couldn't concentrate at all, that's when I started to panic. The guy I was travelling with at the time started to realise I was quite poorly, I wasn't hungover. He spoke to the person at the hostel and we had a look online, there weren't any hospitals or anything."
The backpacker explained the small island did not have adequate healthcare so a local doctor had to come out and test her blood. She added: "I was on a very small island, there wasn't really healthcare, it was just really unlucky that I was there at the time." The doctor found Alysha had typhoid - a bacterial infection which can kill one in five of those infected if they do not get treatment.
The Brit believes she could have caught the infection from something she ate. She said: "I thought I was going to die, to be honest. It was that bad, I was literally like 'this is it'. I was so annoyed as I was so close to the end of my trip. I'd been ill before, but not that ill before."
Alysha revealed why she did not tell her family about the traumatic ordeal she faced while in Indonesia, saying: "I was really worried about telling my family - I didn't tell them, actually, because they were having a lot of stress at work at the time. I didn't tell them until after I'd been poorly. I just thought it was not going to end well for me. I was panicking as I knew I had to leave the country soon, I was really, really scared."
The Brit revealed the shocking symptoms she faced while sick with the potentially deadly infection. Alysha added: "It was just like my body didn't want anything inside it, it was trying to get rid of everything. I didn't eat anything for the whole time I was really ill - probably five or six days.
"Even water, I would sip water and it would come straight back up. It was a very, very extreme sickness." After six days on a drip in a small, cramped medical shack, Alysha received a negative typhoid test and had to get out of the country.
The former social media marketing executive said: "I had to get out of Indonesia because my visa would run out. I'd spent almost my whole time in Indonesia being sick. I had to get out, I had a flight to Thailand.
"They took me off the drip and the next day I had to fly to Bangkok. I still was very sick, the flight was horrific. Even the next few days in Bangkok were very difficult, I couldn't do anything. The lasting effects of it were still a couple of weeks of not feeling quite right."
Alysha was in the middle of a seven-and-a-half-month trip abroad when she came down with the fever. Following a breakup, she made the spontaneous decision to fly out to south Thailand in December 2024. The Brit then visited Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and the Philippines before going to Indonesia.
The backpacker is now urging anyone who visits these countries to ensure they wash their hands and watch what they eat. Alysha said: "I'm not going to say 'nobody pet the stray animals', because that's one of my favourite parts of travelling. I think washing your hands is really important afterwards, because that's something I really didn't do. I was in the middle of nowhere petting stray animals and then going about my day for hours and hours without access to any water to wash my hands in, I didn't bring any sanitiser either."
She also urged people to be careful of what the eat, saying: "A lot of street food you eat isn't kept in clean conditions, it's in a hot country on the street." She added: "I just wasn't careful where I ordered my food from. I was just eating everything that looked good and smelled good at the time - and that's probably not the wisest thing to do."
According to the NHS, typhoid fever is spread through unclean food or water and symptoms include high temperature, headache, coughing, chills, aches, pains, feeling tired, constipation, and a lack of hunger. Those travelling in areas where there's a risk of catching it are advised by the health agency to get a vaccination against the illness.
Travellers should try to see a GP six to eight weeks before travelling. The vaccine lasts for three years and comes as an injection or tablets.
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