Dengue Fever
April 9th, 2008 by MM2H
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 
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