Essay On Dengue Fever

Over the past years Dengue fever has become the major arboviral disease transmitted worldwide, with about 2.5 billion people at risk of having this kind of fever. This is a deadly illness, which can lead to more life threatening situations, such as the dengue haemorrhagic shock. According to the NHS website there hasn’t been any cure or antiviral treatment or vaccine for the illness. However during the past recent years entomologists have been working on how to minimise the outgrowing problem, to help reduce the fast increasing number of people with the fever. On this report I will summarise and discuss about the recent solutions or diagnosis being carried out by scientist to solve the problem. (3, 14)

Dengue fever is a break bone fever caused by a mosquito bite from an infected mosquito with dengue virus (human virus). The mosquito contracts the virus after biting an infected person, it is then affected and every time it bites someone the virus spreads. The type of mosquito that carries this virus is called Aedes Aegypti, and looks the similar to other mosquitoes. There is another type of mosquito that also causes this illness, the aedes albopictus. This type of mosquito is different to aedes aegypti because it has wolbachia. The aedes aegypti is the main mosquito, that has been known to cause the dengue fever and it produces four related viruses which include DEN-1, DEN-2, DEN-3 and DEN-4; these are all capable of causing the fever and makes it more difficult to come up with a treatment or cure. Due to its rapid growth, it has become the fastest growing mosquito borne disease globally threatening one third of the population. Mostly the tropical and sub-tropical parts of the world such as the Caribbean, Central and South America,...

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...oming emerging markets, finding the solution to dengue fever is at the top of their list on developing agenda.(3)

Professor Donald Shepard from Brandeis University, who studied dengue fever while at Schneider Institutes for Health Policy, in his own opinion he explained that aedes aegytpi mosquitoes cannot fly very far therefore areas which are highly populated can be good places for transmission. Also poor areas with lack of reliable water and sewage systems are at risk of having Aedes aegytpi mosquitoes because of good breeding ground for them. (2)

2.5 billion People living in countries like the South East Asia, the Pacific islands, Latin America, the Caribbean islands and parts of Africa have had high issues associated with dengue fever. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has estimated about 50-100 million people are affected by the illness around the world. (3)