If there is a sudden deluge in the Amazon and you’re carrying delicate, water-sensitive telemetry equipment, do not attempt to save the equipment by running back to the biological station…

You may fall, and in putting your hand out to break that fall, inadvertently place it in a pile of jaguar poop…

You may then absentmindedly scratch some of the 200+ seed tick bites you have all over your body from 3 days prior (which it took 2+ hours to pick off with a pair of tweezers because you’re too hairy to use duct tape)…

In scratching said bites, you may then unknowingly transfer hookworm eggs (newly acquired from the aforementioned jaguar poop) from your fingernails into your skin at the bite sites…

You may then notice that some of your bites turn funny-looking and start to actually travel across your skin, and begin to itch so profoundly that if feels like your bones are burning, all because these particular hookworms can’t get through the human dermis…

Because the doctor is a three-hour boat ride and two-hour truck ride away, you may 1) let the one on the inside of your knee go, and 2) listen to a local Quechua man and rub a poultice consisting of spit and the crushed leaves of a plant found outside the hammock house into the one on your forearm…

You may now have 1) a raging case of impetigo behind your knee, and 2) a charred-black chemical burn on your forearm that looks worse than ever, especially because the hookworm is still there, just outside the burn area, the little fucker…

When you finally decide to make the trip to the doctor, he may not have ever seen such a raging infection before, causing him to misdiagnose it and decide to take a blood sample at the site of the infection, thus breaking the dermis and opening your blood stream to the larvae…

You may now have hookworms in your blood stream, meaning that eventually you will be coughing up larvae that mature in your lungs, swallowing them, and having them sexually reproduce in your digestive tract, thus allowing you yourself to poop out their eggs and perpetuate their horrific life cycle.

So if there is a sudden deluge in the Amazon and you’re carrying delicate, water-sensitive telemetry equipment, do not run. Walk.

And take a few doses of Albendezol.