With the dengue cases on the rise in Malaysia, you better learn about the dengue fever symptoms and more importantly how to protect yourself against aedes mosquitoes.

The first time I got dengue fever, my doctor gave me some antibiotics as he thought I got a flu… (stupid idiot as dengue is a virus and antibiotics is a treatment only for bacteria… if he can’t see the difference, then why is he a GP in the first place?).

A few days later the symptoms were clear: red rashes everywhere, a terrible headache and other flu like symptoms. No more appetite, not even a nasi lemak made me willing to eat…

Further on I became really without any strength to do anything. All I could think of was : go to bed and hope when you wake up it’s over… Luckily I went to another doctor who recognised my rashes and sent me to hospital on the spot.

The second time however I got dengue fever, the symptoms were not too clear. Again the terrible headache but the rashes only came after about a week.

The first day I saw the rashes, I went to hospital immediately and my blood platelet count was 25 only: meaning I was lucky to spot the dengue fever symptoms before I would have been bleeding to death the next day.

Dengue cases worldwide

Dengue cases worldwide appear where the transmission of dengue fever: aedes mosquito exists.

As you notice: it’s a tropical problem (red areas on the map show dengue epidemic areas, pink areas on the map are infested with Aedes mosquito’s but don’t have too many dengue fever cases reported).

Prevention of dengue

The best protection against any mosquito is a mosquito net and mosquito repellant. Read more tips and techniques on how to protect yourself against aedes mosquitoes.

Treatments for dengue fever

As you notice, after 20 years in the tropics I survived 2 dengue fevers. Treatments are "easy" as there is no cure.

The disease kind of kills your appetite and you get dehydrated in a degree you need a drip to keep enough liquid getting into your body.

Then your blood will be monitored each day as dengue will make your blood thinner or get your blood platelets down. As such when your platelet count becomes too low, you will be given extra blood-platelets through a drip. You have to cross fingers that you are in a hospital where the quality of the blood-serums is not tampered with…

Summarized: dengue fever symptoms feel as if you have the worst flu ever . If you live in the tropics, go and see your doctor and if you are loosing appetite and feel lethargic, make sure you ask your doctor if these are dengue fever symptoms.

Technorati Tags: aedes mosquito, aedes mosquitoes, dengue cases, Dengue fever, dengue fever symptoms, mosquitoes

My previous post about aedes mosquitos alarmed some people back home, so let me explain what dengue fever is all about.

Yellow fever is not dengue fever

I still remember my doctor opening a book, ruffled through some pages and decided to give me a jab against yellow fever before I left to Malaysia…

Yellow fever is not dengue fever. There is no vaccine for dengue fever, the only way not to contract dengue fever is to make sure you don’t get bitten by those zebra striped mosquitos called aedes mosquitos.

Malaria is not dengue fever

What malaria and dengue have in common is that there aren’t vaccines for both fevers.

The big difference between the 2 is:

• once you have malaria: every so many months it will make you feverish and you need to take medicine (quinine works). It’s a recurrent fever so of course it’s monetized to "cure" it and not to prevent it
• once you have dengue: you will get sick once, and it’s kind of do or die…

What does Dengue Fever do with you?

Dengue fever messes up your immune system but more dangerous; it reduces your bloodplatelets count. In other words: it’s making your blood thinner to the extent that you can get internal bleeding and bleed to death.

The solution is to get into the hospital online, so they can monitor your blood and make it thicker again (give you extra bloodplatelets) once it’s getting quite too thin for comfort.

They will also put you on a drip because otherwise your body will get dehydrated. An extra nuisance is that you don’t have any appetite, so you won’t eat much to built strength and let your body fight off the virus.

The problem is being diagnosed too late. It all starts with headaches and other flu like symptoms, so if you are a strong person ready to "fight a terrible flu", you could end up with internal bleedings and then things are too late.

How to be aware of dengue

The aedes mosquito loves the urban areas, especially construction sites (read booming cities). It only needs 1 drop of water to lay eggs…

They tend to only come out after 17.00 and before 09.00 am, but rest assured, I have seen many aedes mosquitoes not wearing a watch.

If you do have "a strange flu", make sure you ask your doctor what experience he has with dengue.

It took me 2 young doctors (you have a flu, take antibiotics…) before I visited a 3th much older doctor who looked at me, put the blood-pressure machine on my arm kind of hurting me and 2 minutes later my arm was full with little red dots.

"Can you make it to a hospital now or do I get you transport?" "For what I can see, you have dengue fever…" he said.

As you can see, dengue fever didn’t kill me

Technorati Tags: aedes mosquito, Dengue fever, fevers, jab, malaria, medicine, mosquito, mosquitos, quinine, recurrent fever, vaccines, yellow fever, zebra