Chikungunya, A highly infectious, mosquito borne disease may soon arrive in US
When Clare Rourke woke up one morning last March with a sore toe, she didn’t worry too much about it. Rourke, her husband and their three daughters were living in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, for a few months as part of a family year abroad. She and her husband had traveled widely, through India, the Middle East and South America, and had never been seriously ill. And they took necessary precautions, making sure everyone in the family received the recommended vaccinations.
But by the middle of that day, Rourke was sicker than she’d ever been. “I hurt in so many places — my feet, hand, wrists, ankles, elbows, knees,” she says now. “I actually remember thinking that I just might die.” Her joints were so swollen, hot and painful that she couldn’t rest her elbows on the bed. Her fever rose to 104. “I felt like something was attacking me and I was seriously losing the fight,” she says. That night, two of her daughters also became achy and feverish, and within a few days all three had rashes on their hands, legs and arms. They were infected with chikungunya, a virus originally from Central Africa.
The virus, transmitted by mosquito bites, was rampaging through Rourke’s village as part of an outbreak that has stretched across the Indian Ocean, India and Southeast Asia since 2005. Now, it is roaring through the Western Hemisphere. In December 2013, the first locally transmitted case of chikungunya in the Americas was identified on the Caribbean island of St. Martin. As of mid-April, more than 25,000 cases had been reported across the region, from the Dominican Republic down to French Guiana, on the north coast of South America.
Public health officials suspect the virus may already be in Puerto Rico, and they predict it will make the leap to the continental United States within months. “There’s nothing to stop this outbreak from continuing to spread,” says Lyle Petersen, director of the division of vector-borne diseases of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus is likely to escalate this summer, when the Caribbean rainy season sets in and mosquito populations climb. Chikungunya seems poised to join a handful of tropical diseases — including dengue, Chagas’ disease and West Nile — that are spreading across the southern United States.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/21/chikungunya-a-highlyinfectiousdiseasemaysoonarriveintheus.html
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