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Man on truck

The joy of Dengue Fever. I have been fortunate enough to come across this illness, not once, but several

times while in Cambodia: seeing a family suffer through the illness, and then experiencing it myself a few days later. The dengue fever mosquito, Aedes aegypti, transmits the virus by feeding on an infected individual and then subsequently feeding on an uninfected individual. Once most members of a household acquire the illness, any uninfected person living in the same area is highly likely to contract the disease. Because the mosquito carrying the virus is unique, you can usually tell if you have probable exposure to the virus by examining the mosquitos which bite you. I was just so fortunate to be fed on by at least 20 the Aedes mosquitos.

Why the photo of the man on a truck? It was my last photo of Cambodia: soon after arriving in Phnom Penh from the rural area I was previously, I started having the symptoms: fever, nausea, severe headache, malaise, myalgia, and arthralgia. The arthralgia of dengue fever is difficult to put into words, but you can try to imagine it as a group of vices on your knees, elbows, hips, and shoulders, squeezing your joints harder and harder. You can’t massage the joint pain away, you can’t sleep it off as you are awoken by throbbing joint pain or throbbing retroorbital pain, and there really is no way to treat it except with supportive care. Not pleasant.

Aedes aegypti, with characteristic leg stripes.
(image from Wikipedia)

Bonus information: local Khmer claim that only foreigners are able to contract the illness; while generally true, it is not because of culturally-distinct genomes, but rather because local children contract the disease at very early ages. Once infected with one of four dengue flavivirus serotypes, an individual is immune from that serotype. Foreigners simply have no immunity to dengue, so they have a very high probability of contracting the disease if they visit rural areas!

References:
Moore Shepherd, Susan; et al. Dengue Fever. eMedicine Online
Price, Daniel; et al. Dengue Fever. eMedicine Online
Dengue fever @ Wikipedia