‘HE COULDN’T GO ON’

Lariam spared Cameron Quinn from malaria but he paid the ultimate price

COOLAMON in Australia’s New South Wales may be little known to the wider world but it is home to Jane Quinn. The sparsely populated wheat-belt town, 300 miles south-west of Sydney, has been Quinn’s address for eight years. In that time she has steadily built a life and a career as a senior lecturer in veterinary physiology at Charles Sturt University. Coolamon is not altogether similar to her former home in the Borders village of West Linton. The weather in the “hay and chaff” capital, she says, can almost be biblical in nature. Her decision to move to the other side of the world followed the tragedy that struck Quinn and her family 11 years ago this month.

It was on March 11, 2006, when Quinn entered the spare room at her West Linton home to discover that her 35-year-old husband – and father to her two young daughters – had hanged himself. Cameron, a retired British Army major, had been suffering from violent nightmares, severe paranoia and mood swings since he had returned from a military exercise in Kenya in 2001. Yet, with no prior warning of any suicidal intentions, and leaving behind no note, Cameron’s death by his own hands hit the Quinn household with a terrible and incalculable force.

“The only thing I can think of that meant he may have considered suicide previously was that he knew exactly where he was going to find the rope that he used,” says Quinn, who is 47. “By the time I found him, he was dead.”

For Quinn, Cameron’s struggles began almost immediately after he was prescribed the weekly anti-malarial drug mefloquine – also known as Lariam. When Cameron, then a captain in the Highlanders, told Quinn that he had been given the drug to combat the mosquito-borne disease for his stint in the east African state, she was uneasy.

“I told him there had been a few issues around the drug,” she recalls. “I worked at Edinburgh University at that point as a neuroscientist and we had seen a lot of the work that had come through looking at the side effects of Lariam because they were mainly neurological in origin.”