First trip to Africa (12 or 13 years ago / Namibia).
Not Africa's fault, I caught a very aggressive, fast developing respiratory infection - very painful symptoms like Bronchitis or Strep Throat, which hit me on day one so, probably caught it on the 2 day plane ride from Alaska (warm air is unhealthy hah hah).
For that, I took the antibiotic "Cipro" which I carry when travelling.
Disease beaten down properly.
However, side affect later developed at home, of large, painful cysts on wrists and Achilles' tendon.
Left wrist still has small one years later (scar tissue from cyst ?).
Fourth trip to Africa, (5 or 6 years ago / South Africa) Wife and myself both caught Tick Bite Fever (when you're close to buffaloes, I suppose there must be ticks).
Symptoms began a couple days before flying home but, even before that I knew we were in for it because, we had both been bitten by 2 or 3 ticks each, and had one each particular bite that turned black and more painful than an insect bight should be.
Incidentally, this was in spite of the fact that we regularly checked ourselves and each other for ticks, religiously, removing many before they had the chance to auger in.
According to our book on Tropical Diseases, the dime sized, black / painful lump where bitten is symptom #1 with that particular disease.
Bright side of the coin is that the specific strain of this disease is not life threatening and the very best part is that grain alcohol calms the nausea, headache and your eye's discomfort to bright light (such as normal southern Africa sunshine).
After a couple days of "Gin Therapy", we flew home, visited our Doctors, took small doses of Doxyc
