Posted on 09/28/2016 11:21:45 AM PDT by Innovative
My eldest great niece contracted a mild form of Dengue (not sure which strain) while she was in Bermuda (hardly what I would think of as a 3rd world country) back in June/July of this year. She is working on her Masters in Colonial History and is a graduate assistant and her professor who was born Bermuda, was awarded a research grant on the regional role that the Bermuda area played in the American Revolution and the American Civil War and this is in large part on which she is writing her Master’s thesis. She loved the work and loved Bermuda and can’t wait to go back one day.
I was very concerned when her mom told me that she went to the infirmary and was diagnosed with Dengue. But she also told me that my great niece had a mild fever and some flu like symptoms (headache and some body aches) and a mild rash but that she recovered very quickly, only down for a few days. While she said she knew she was sick and that it was the rash that prompted her to go to the infirmary, she also said that the common flu she came down with here in the States a year earlier was much worse and took longer to recover from.
And she was completely recovered and symptom free weeks before she traveled back to the States. She also laughed it off as being part of her research – said it was the type of disease those Colonial era Brits she was studying might have contracted.
I will have to ask her next time I see her if she is aware of risks were she to ever contract one of the other strains, if she was advised of that.
But it would seem however, at least according to this paper, that Dengue or Dengue like illnesses have made appearances in the US before - New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston, Augusta, and Savannah going back to the 1850’s and later in Florida, Georgia and Texas.
Yes, encourage her to be very diligent with the bug repellant. I have found out that mosquitoes bite through clothing, so it is important to spray clothes with that stuff, too.
It is often the case that the first case of dengue is mild, while the second case is life-threatening. I am not an immunologist, so cannot explain the exact mechanism, but the severity of the disease caused by a second strain is a direct result of immunity to the first strain.
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