A Disease of Poverty: Dengue Fever

Dengue fever is a tropical disease caused by the dengue virus. It is a communicative disease and is also known as 'breakbone fever'. Symptoms of it include fever, skin rash, muscle and joint pains, and headaches. Dengue is often transmitted by a strain of mosquitoes, it is then also very rarely passed from person to person, and by vertical transmission (mother to offspring), in Singapore the disease is endemic, and organ transplants and blood tranfusions carry a risk of dengue fever transmission.

As you can see from the above map, red denotes a country or region with a dengue fever epidemic, and the azure shows a country with a more minor problem. Clearly, the virus is far more prevalent in the southern hemisphere, where climate is warmer and more humid and mosquitoes thrive. Also, most of the areas with high rates of disease are relatively poor, or have high rates of depravity. Clearly, sub-saharan Africa is rife with the ailment, where health care is poor and medication scarse, and India has a high rate of it, where the dense population and high humidity promotes the spread of the infection. In southern USA resides probably the clearest anomaly, however the hot temperatures and high numbers of immigrants from the southern and central Americas with little money to access health care will probably have lead to the disease being in this area.
The disease currently has no known vaccines, hence to control the disease there has been attempts at killing off the mosquitoes that transmit it, and controlling their areas. The best advice given is just to avoid being bitten. There is a mortality rate of one in ten of all people who get the disease. Usually as treatment sufferers are told to take many fluids, and some are given them intravenously. Ibuprofen and all risky methods are avoided as bleeding can be highly fatal when infected.