Dengue Fever Cases Reach Record Highs
On the way back from a morning run up the mountain on Koh Phangan island, Natalie Revie felt something was wrong. It was not just fatigue. "I felt my back had collapsed. Any strength or power I had there was gone completely," recalls Revie, a freelance writer from England who lives in Thailand. "I felt my legs and hips belonged to a dingly, dangly scarecrow."
Revie, 30, stayed in bed the rest of the day, but she went from bad to worse. Her bones were aching all over, and she was unable to move. The stabbing pains behind her eyes were so terrible that she couldn't look at anything. Revie went to see a doctor the next day and had some blood tests that confirmed her initial worry: she had dengue.
Dengue fever, sometimes called breakbone fever, has long been endemic in Asia, especially in the tropical areas. Transmitted by the striped Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, it affects hundreds of thousands of people in the region each year, both in rural and urban areas. This year, the number of infections is reaching highs across the continent.
