Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne disease caused by a virus of the same name. It’s a part of the Flaviviridae family, known for its other famous members: Yellow Fever, West Nile, and Zika.
It’s also referred to as breakbone fever, but that should be the least of your concern...what you need to worry about is a complete system shutdown.
Most commonly found in tropical regions, Dengue puts 40-50% of the global population at risk.With symptoms ranging from fever, rashes, painful joint and muscle aches to vomiting,
Dengue can resemble the flu, but it can become life-threatening in a much different way.
To understand how Dengue spreads, it helps to start with how it gets in , the mosquito specifically a species called Aedes aegypti.It's a day-biting mosquito. It actually prefers the crepuscular times of the day, so that's dawn or dusk, and it will feed on multiple people.It might feed three or four times in its lifetime, and that gives the Dengue virus ample opportunity to be passed between human hosts by a single infected female mosquito.
what makes these types of viruses so quick to take off: It is their genetic architecture,which allows them to begin producing proteins immediately after they enter the host cell. It is probably infecting almost 400 million people a year as far as we know, but only a small fraction of people actually get sick, about 90 million a year.
Once the Dengue virus gets in through the skin, it can take several days to a week. eventually find its way into your lymph nodes and, then, bloodstream.
From there, it’s just one big fast-track to Flavivirus-town.So Dengue's primary target and the way it sustains itself in your body is in white blood cells, macrophages and monocytes are antibody receptor-bearing cells that the Dengue virus uses to bind and enter the cell.The cell is naturally taking anything that's bound to its receptors and phagocytizing it,so basically pulling it into an internal cellular capsule, and once that happens, the pH of that capsule changes.
And when the pH changes and that lock-and-key relationship between the virus protein and the host cell receptor proteins experience that change in pH, a pore is formed... and through that pore, the virus genome enters into the host's cytoplasm. And from there it’s a pretty sophisticated version of copy and paste.The virus uses the host cell to duplicate itself.
The most frustrating phenomenon with Dengue virus is that people seem to start to recover. They might have three to four to maybe seven days of fever depending on when they first exhibit symptoms, and then the fever's starting to go down, we can sort of see the diminishment of symptoms, and then hemorrhagic fever or shock syndrome can kick in very quickly after that.
So Dengue is not something to take lightly, but these extreme cases are still pretty rare.
Of the nearly half a billion cases reported annually, only 500,000 are severe, with many countries reporting less than 1% fatality rate.
Still, knowing the symptoms and ways to help prevent initial infection are key.
.And while there is a vaccine, there’s still a long way to goThe challenge with developing a vaccine for Dengue is that you need to develop a vaccine that's effective against all four serotypes simultaneously, and this is very unusual. Treatment:
There are vaccines that can vaccinate against all four types, but they don't do it to the equivalent level.
So you might be mostly immune to one and then a little immune to some of the other stereotypes. also read:
0 Comments