While the weather outside is truly frightful, with most of the United States being plunged into a polar vortex,

temperatures, wind chills, and of course that frost-bitten feeling when you go outside,

it's not quite giving Gilmore girls crisp fall season is it it's

really more the kind of place where Olaf from frozen would just simply thrive even

if he is looking for Samantha well this week I figured since it's so cold out there,

let's go ahead and talk about something that has to do with warm weather.

And at the same time, try to continue with our Bugs and Drugs series,

episode number two here on the med geeks podcast.

I'm your host Dr. Niket Son Paul, your friendly neighbor internist and

gastrantherologist and we're going to be talking about the tropics.

More specifically when it comes to bugs and drugs tropical sprew a chronic

diarrheal illness so kick that music off my man and let's jump right in Now if you're wondering where this word Sprew comes from it's an actual Dutch word that's sprout.

It's a term applied for diarrhea.

And it's basically a terminology that's used for various conditions like Celiac, tropical sprew, and even an alma sartan related sprew like

illness that occurs in people who take this medication.

All of them have the predominant symptom of actually having diarrhea.

Tropical Spru itself occurs in the tropics.

Now in the Western Hemisphere it's particularly prevalent in the Dominican Republic,

Puerto Rico, and Cuba, but what's interesting is that it's never seen in the Bahamas or Jamaica.

In the eastern hemisphere, we see a lot of cases in South Asia, but it's very uncommon in Africa and the Middle East.

In the United States, there are a few cases reported as simply case reports, but again, it's

difficult to tease out whether those patients were actually diagnosed because they were in the US, but

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