Kolo Toure: bringing malaria to Emirates

There are many obstacles for footballers looking to stay healthy and help their team. Torn ligaments, hamstring pulls, dead legs, and of course, the dreaded metatarsal injury.

However, there's a new one to be on the look out for, especially if you're an Arsenal player: malaria.

From the wonderfully unrefined pages of The Sun:

Toure, 27, picked up the disease at home in the Ivory Coast and is now a doubt for the start of the new Premier League campaign.

Gunners boss Arsene Wenger has already lost Alex Hleb to Barcelona, Mathieu Flamini to Milan and Gilberto Silva to Panathanaikos.

And his plans to bring in new faces has been interrupted with the news of Toure’s illness.

It's a sad story, one that saw Toure taken to hospital while the club was touring Austria and Hungary. I imagine that spending several days and nights in a Austrian hospital could not have helped his discomfort in any way.

Still, he should recover smartly, as others have in the past: the same article mentions Celestine Babayaro, Yakubu and Lomana LuaLua as players who've all returned to football successfully following a run-in with the deadly virus. Such a silver lining to the malarial cloud doesn't help Wenger much, considering they've done nothing but sell so far this off-season.

After the jump, some videos about malaria, because I know you're all dying to learn more. Also, a song and a video about Toure, which for us non-Gooners might be as painful as malaria itself.

[Ed. Note: The Guardian confirms the story, although after that mess with Kaka, I still eye them suspiciously]