What is Dengue or Dengue Fever?

What is Dengue or Dengue Fever?

If you are in India, and also watching various news channels on television, you might have heard and watched how dengue fever is taking away the lives of young and old alike in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

What is dengue or dengue fever?

Dengue fever is a viral disease that causes flu-like symptoms. The virus is spread by mosquitoes and is largely found in many countries in South and Central America, Asia and Africa. During the rainy seasons when there are a lot of mosquitoes, the disease can spread rapidly in epidemics. It is reported that each year, more and more people suffer from dengue. In India too, many people are infected with it and as I said earlier, many innocent lives are also lost due to the dreaded disease.

The disease is not communicable between people. It takes between two to ten days to become infected until the people become sick. The disease generally goes away by itself within a week, but many people feel more tired than usual, up to a month afterwards. When healed, the body develops resistance to the variant of the virus. But because dengue is prevalent in four different ways, one can get the disease again by any of the other virus types.

At times, the dengue fever can become severe and may require treatment in a hospital. This is very strange. If a person gets dengue fever for the second or third time, it does increase the risk that they will become seriously ill, but the risk is still low. The mosquitoes that spread the virus are said to be of more aggressive nature and active in the day. For that reason, it is difficult to completely protect a person from the stings of mosquito.

To a certain extent, mosquito repellents and protective clothing can be helpful and protect against other diseases that are transmitted by mosquitoes. There is no vaccine for dengue fever. When the disease breaks out, the symptoms appear quickly.

Red eyes, high fever with sweating and colds, pain in the eyes, headache, severe muscle pain and small red spots on the body are the symptoms that indicate that a person is affected by dengue. Small or large bruises may also appear on the skin and they are the signs that one had the more severe form of dengue. However, they can be noticed only after a few days.