Breakbone

Breakbone

Dengue fever
Not a pleasant disease. Been there and done that with Dengue (Breakbone) Fever. It really does feel like every bone in your body wants to break if you are touched. Bad thing about it? Once you have had it the chances of developing the fatal hemorrhagic variety markedly increase upon contracting it a second time.
 
Certainly some of my friends from the Hispanic Caribbean have had it... And I believe in at least one case, twice.

WHO Dengue

Malaria was very common during the Civil War, among other mosquito-borne maladies...
Take the worst case of flu you ever had and multiply it by what feels like 100. It literally hurt to blink my eyes!
I developed symptoms - the fever and chills while at a World Cup qualifying match between Canada and Honduras in San Pedro Sula in 2006. Flat on my back in a dark room with 101-102 degree fever for 3-4 days before starting to improve.

There have been outbreaks in Hawaii (2015), Texas (2013), and Florida (2013, 2020)
 
Not a pleasant disease. Been there and done that with Dengue (Breakbone) Fever. It really does feel like every bone in your body wants to break if you are touched. Bad thing about it? Once you have had it the chances of developing the fatal hemorrhagic variety markedly increase upon contracting it a second time.
Sheesh!! Glad you are better.
 
Sheesh!! Glad you are better.
It was a while ago but I can honestly say it was absolutely horrid. After the acute phase and I was able to go back to teaching school, I would tire very easily. At t morning recess and at lunch time I would take a nap in my classroom so I could make it through to the end of the school day.

I cannot even imagine this in the 1860s under field conditions.
 
Yellow fever was another tropical/subtropical mosquito borne disease.
Absolutely. I believe that Tennessee had yellow fever outbreaks into the late 1870s?

In Spanish, the disease was often referred to as el "vómito negro" or black vomit. In the final stages, the victim is raving and delirious, bleeding from eyes, nose, mouth, etc. and projectile vomiting blood, which resembles coffee grounds. People would panic and flee, leaving the sufferer to succumb without anyone around. Carlos Finlay in Cuba and William C. Gorgas in the United States and elsewhere identified the vector and did much to eradicate yellow fever from regions where it used to be very common. Gorgas met his future wife in South Texas while she was a patient of his.

I have it that when yellow jack broke out aboard ships, standard procedure was to burn copious quantities of smelly sulfur below decks, and attempt to sail out of the tropics. It often worked, but no one knew why until many, many decades later...
 
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