# 4627
The spring edition of Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine has a nice background piece on Dengue Fever, which includes not only an extensive history of the disease, but a good deal on the difficulties involved in creating a vaccine.
Since I’m somewhat of a medical history buff, I found this to be a particularly good read.
First this backgrounder, then I’ll return with more.
The Devil's Disease: Dengue Fever
Spiking fever, searing muscle and joint pain, blood seeping through the skin, shock and possibly death—the severest form of dengue fever can inflict unspeakable misery. Once rare, dengue fever now threatens more than 2.5 billion people. What will it take to stop an old disease spreading with a new vengeance?
Story by Patrick McGuire
Although Dengue has been known for hundreds of years, epidemics prior to 1940 were sporadic, limited pretty much to the tropics, and occurred infrequently.
Classical Dengue - or Dengue-like illness - was generally a non-fatal illness, producing severe flu-like symptoms (and body aches) that lasted for a week or two.
In the 1950s, a new form of Dengue was identified in Southeast Asia – DHF (Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever) – which if left untreated, can have a fatality rate as high as 50%.
Admittedly, reporting and surveillance prior to that time was lacking, but there is little doubt that the first major epidemics of Dengue – including the deadlier variant - DHF (Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever) – began after World War II.
Since then, the incidence and spread of the disease has been increasing dramatically.
Since adults in endemic areas are likely to have been already exposed to the four variants during their lifetime, this disease presents most commonly in young children.
The range of the virus can be seen in the two maps below.
Last year, Dengue returned to Key West Florida after an absence of more than 50 years (see MMWR: Dengue Fever In Key West), although the incidence in the United States remains extremely low.
Although I write about Dengue, and other mosquito borne pathogens from time to time, Crof at Crofsblog continues to provide some of the best day-to-day coverage of the disease – particularly in the Americas – on the web.
For more on the disease, you may wish to visit the CDC’s Dengue information page at http://www.cdc.gov/dengue/.
A few of my earlier blogs on the subject include:
Dengue Resurfaces In Key West
The Threat Of Vector Borne Diseases
It's A Smaller World After All
