US docs not aware of mosquito-borne virus
Print Edition
THOUSANDS of travelers to the Caribbean and nearby regions are coming home with an unwanted souvenir: a mosquito-borne virus that recently settled there.
The virus, called chikungunya (chih-kihn-GOON’-yuh), causes severe, often disabling joint pain, and few US doctors are prepared to recognize its signs.
At one New York City hospital, a woman arrived in such agony she had to be admitted just to control her pain. “Thinks she has chicken virus??” the mystified staff wrote on the medical chart after interviewing the patient.
Since it spread from Asia and Africa in late 2013, chikungunya has infected a million people in the Caribbean, Latin America and parts of South America and Mexico. Actress Lindsay Lohan recently said she got it while in French Polynesia.
In the US alone, more than 2,300 travelers since last May have brought home the virus, which has nothing to do with chickens. About a dozen people have gotten it from mosquito bites in Florida.
The virus can cause fever, a rash, headache and joint pain, mostly in the arms and legs, that can lasts for months and in some cases, even years. Symptoms usually start three to seven days after the mosquito bite.
It happened to Marisa Hargrove, who went to a Miami emergency room with joint pain so bad her husband had to help her to the bathroom. A doctor ran tests for common illnesses “and basically called me his mystery case of the day,” she said.
Back home and getting sicker, she searched her symptoms on the Internet and returned to the hospital.
“Is it possible it’s this new chikungunya?” she asked. “The doctor looked at me like I was crazy and said, ‘What the heck is that?’”
A blood test confirmed she had it, and the 42-year-old Miami woman became one of the first Americans to have caught chikungunya from local mosquitoes. State health officials say at least 11 people have been infected in Florida, and they worry the virus will become established there.
Florida is not the only state at risk. The mosquitoes that spread chikungunya live throughout the South, West and Eastern seaboard of the US. Local mosquitoes that bite a traveler infected with the virus can pass it on when they bite others.
“Anywhere that’s warm and humid and can sustain mosquitoes year round. So Florida, Texas, any of those Southern states, it could happen,” said Stephen Higgs, a Kansas State University infectious disease expert and an editor of a scientific journal on mosquito-spread diseases.
There is little treatment besides medicine for pain.
“The symptoms come and go,” Hargrove said. “Even today I still get pains in my ankles, my knees, my fingers but it’s very transient. You never know when it’s going to happen.”
Outbreaks spread by locally infected mosquitoes have occurred in Italy and France.
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