On the way back from a morning run up the mountain on Koh Phangan island, Natalie Revie felt something was wrong. It was not just fatigue. "I felt my back had collapsed. Any strength or power I had there was gone completely," recalls Revie, a freelance writer from England who lives in Thailand. "I felt my legs and hips belonged to a dingly, dangly scarecrow."
Revie, 30, stayed in bed the rest of the day, but she went from bad to worse. Her bones were aching all over, and she was unable to move. The stabbing pains behind her eyes were so terrible that she couldn't look at anything. Revie went to see a doctor the next day and had some blood tests that confirmed her initial worry: she had dengue.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Vagabond Virus
Scott Tind Simmons was at his office in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, when he started to feel sick. By the time he got to bed, his flu-like symptoms gave way to achy joints and feverish dreams. That's when he got suspicious that he had dengue fever, the mosquito-borne virus that, in its deadly form, causes blood to seep from the bloodstream into tissue and eventually from the body's orifices. Several days later, doctors diagnosed the expat aid worker with a milder, non-lethal variation of the disease. Since there are no drugs or vaccines for dengue, Tind Simmons did what some 38,500 infected Cambodians did this year: he drank plenty of water and waited for his bout of "bone-break fever," as the disease is often called, to go away.
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