Dengue fever

The rainy season is officially here now. I thought I could handle it no problem, but this rain is SERIOUS. I had pictured it like the storms in NJ; heavy rain for a few hours and that's that. Sometimes it'll be raining here when you wake up and it's still raining when you go to bed. One of the employees told me that they've had rain for a week straight before, no breaks. I usually love the rain but when it's pouring out it's really really tough to find enough will power to walk up that mountain of stairs and go to work. I'm hoping once I snag my rain jacket from home it'll be a bit easier since I won't be saturated all day like I am now.

Along with the rain comes a whole lot of bugs (don't worry, my fly friends haven't left me yet either, we're just adding black beetles and mosquitos to the ranks now.) On a happy note, the gallon of bug repellant I brought with me is finally coming in handy :)

This week in the clinic a very sweet boy came in with a fever. He's relatively new and is always super polite when I see him, so I automatically like him. Anyway, he came in with a high fever and red rash all over his body. At first we thought he might have scarlet fever since that's relatively common here, but the rash looked different. We drew some blood and his labs came back with our answer... dengue fever!

Here's what the rash looks like (this is a google photo, not the actual kid.

Dengue is caused by mosquito bites. Some mosquitos carry the dengue virus and pass it along to people when they're bit. Symptoms are usually high fever (104-105 degrees), red rash all over the body and headaches. Depending on the type of dengue virus the mosquito is carrying, sometimes people will develop Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever which is a lot more serious and involves people bleeding out and dying from blood loss. People who've had regular dengue fever are at higher risk for the worse type if they get bit by another infected mosquito and for some reason white people and kids under 12 are at higher risk for the bad kind too. 220 million people are infected with dengue every year. Of these people, two million develop dengue hemorrhagic fever. Most of these cases are children in Central America and Asia.

Once we got a diagnosis the clinic went into full force public health mode. The doctor printed out brochures about dengue and started giving inservices to all the staff. Maintenance was put in charge of getting rid of all mosquito breeding grounds so you could see kids rolling old tires out to the garbage collection all morning. Unfortunately there's no vaccine to prevent dengue so now we just have to keep an eye on the kids and hope that the mosquito numbers don't get too out of control. Luckily the kid in the clinic is doing fine and will probably head back to his section soon. Let's just hope that this one mild case is all I'll see during my NPH time.