Infectious Diseases

Dengue Fever and Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever (DHF) are acute febrile (fever) diseases that are found in the tropics.

Dengue is often found in urban areas of developed tropical nations, including Brazil, Singapore, and Taiwan.

Symptoms

The symptoms of Dengue include:

• Abdominal pain
• Diarrhea
• Fever, with a sudden onset
• Nausea
• Severe headache
• Severe muscle and joint pains (myalgias and arthralgias—severe pain gives it the name break-bone fever or bonecrusher disease)
• Skin rashes, which is typically bright red and usually appears first on the lower limbs and the chest. This rash can spread to cover most of the body
• Vomiting

Some people develop milder symptoms, and sometimes no skin rash appears, and this can lead to misdiagnosis.

Chagas Disease, also called American Trypanosomiasis, is a tropical parasitic disease which occurs in the Americas, especially in South America.

Symptoms

The early symptoms of Chagas Disease, also called American Trypanosomiasis, include:

• Swelling at the site of infection

As the disease progresses, over the course of anything up to twenty years, a range of serious chronic symptoms will appear, including heart disease and malformation of the intestines (Megaintestine). If left untreated, Chagas Disease is often eventually fatal.

Causes

Chagas Disease, also called American Trypanosomiasis, is caused by a flagellate protozoan, called Trypanosoma cruzi.

African Trypanosomiasis, commonly called Sleeping Sickness, may be transmitted to humans, or between humans, in a variety of ways:

• Blood and Organ Donations: If infected people donate blood or organs, and proper blood scanning isn’t conducted, then the recipients of the blood and organs can become infected.

• Fetal Transmission: Mothers can pass the infection onto their unborn children because the parasite can cross the placenta, causing prenatal death.

• Insect Bite: specifically the bite of the Tsetse Fly - this is the most common method of transmission.

Treatment

A range of medications are available to treat African Trypanosomiasis, commonly called Sleeping Sickness.
The current recommended treatments for the first stage of the disease include one or more of the following:

• Intravenous pentamidine (for T.b. gambiense)
• Intravenous suramin (for T.b. rhodesiense)
• Intravenous melarsoprol combined with oral nifurtimox

African Trypanosomiasis, commonly called Sleeping Sickness, is a disease caused when the Trypanosoma parasite is transmitted to humans and animals, normally by the bite of the Tsetse Fly.
Sleeping Sickness is very common in certain regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, a region that includes 36 countries and around 60 million people.

Current estimates are that between 50,000 and 70,000 people are currently infected with Sleeping Sickness, although the number does appear to be declining in recent years.

Three major Sleeping Sickness epidemics have occurred in the past hundred years or so, the last being in 1970.

Symptoms

The early symptoms of African Trypanosomiasis, commonly called Sleeping Sickness, include:

• Fever
• Headaches
• Joint pain
• Swollen lymph nodes, which can become very large.

Tropical diseases are defined as infectious diseases that occur in the tropical or subtropical regions. These diseases do not only impact the locals in these regions but due to these areas being available to air travel, travelers often contract tropical diseases and bring them back to their homes, thus spreading tropical diseases to other countries.

The World Health Organization (WHO) focuses attention on the poor and developing regions of Americas, Asia and Africa. There are ten tropical diseases that WHO focuses on currently. The ten diseases are:

• African trypanosomiasis
• Chagas disease
• Dengue fever
• Leishmaniasis
• Leprosy
• Lymphatic filariasis
• Malaria
• Onchocerciasis
• Schistosomiasis
• Tuberculosis