Inadequate reporting
Inadequate reporting
There was an article about dengue on The New Yorker website written by Carolyn Kormann. I studied dengue for about two to three years while a graduate student in infectious disease/epidemiology at Emory University. In that period, I read upward of 400 scientific articles about dengue, and also worked for a time at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s dengue branch in Puerto Rico.
I don’t think any more articles should be published in newspapers or magazines about dengue by people who are not well-informed about the disease. I have seen many articles published about this disease in the past year. Not a single one mentioned perhaps the most critical and fundamental biological aspect of dengue, the quality that makes it so fascinating and attracted people like me to study it.
There are four distinct dengue viruses. They go by the names: DENV-1, DENV-2, DENV-3 and DENV-4. When a person is infected with one of these serotypes, they can never contract that specific one again. They are, however, susceptible to the other three. This is called a secondary infection, and is statistically associated with dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome, the most severe clinical manifestations of dengue, with very high mortality rates.
Dengue has been around for thousands of years. Known as “breakbone fever” because of its high fevers and bone pain, it is a painful disease (I have had it), but it’s usually not fatal. That is, until the past few decades, when all four serotypes were co-circulating in most geographic regions.
Throughout history, this didn’t happen. Most serotypes were geographically isolated. Dengue is now endemic in 120 nations, putting 3 billion to 4 billion people at risk, and causing up to 500 million infections per year, making it probably the most common infection in the world.
None of this was mentioned in the articles I have seen in the media throughout the past year, though it is neglectful and poor reporting to do so. People and the public have a right to know.
A primary or initial dengue infection is uncomfortable and painful, though often not fatal. But people should know that another infection could be fatal or very severe. Why hasn’t anybody in the media reported this?
I wonder how any person writing about dengue can do so without knowing by far the most important clinical and biological aspect of the disease: that dengue can range from a very self-limiting disease, with a sub-clinical infection rate up to 90 percent (meaning up to 90 percent of people with dengue do not know they are infected), to one of the most fatal diseases in the world.
The public needs to know this, and this information is not being properly reported. Those who write about dengue must be better informed; it is their journalistic duty. Anybody who has read one or two scientific articles about dengue will know all of this. It is imperative to people’s ability to protect themselves to have this information, and in the future journalists and publications must do better to inform the public.
Matthew Pflaum
Honolulu