WHEN a disease has the nickname 'breakbone fever', you know it is going to be far from pleasant. But even this does not prepare most sufferers for the sheer agony of dengue fever.
'Like a five-day, full-body migraine' is one woman's graphic summation of her bout with the dreaded dengue. 'Incapacitating,' another victim says. 'The searing pain in your limbs and back is overwhelming. You writhe and corkscrew to find some position to cheat the agony but it makes no difference.' And they are the lucky ones. Those not so lucky progress to the next stage of the disease, dengue haemorrhagic fever, where sufferers start bleeding from the gums, organs and under the skin. If they do not receive prompt treatment, plasma leaches out of the blood vessels into the surrounding tissue, blood pressure plummets, the body goes into shock. Vital organs fail. The person dies.
Now for the bad news: dengue fever is on the march throughout Southeast Asia, spread by buzzing legions of a tiny, tiger-striped mosquito named Aedes aegypti. While researchers say the mosquito does not exist in numbers large enough to start an epidemic in Hong Kong, it is running rampant in most of the countries Hong Kongers are likely to visit for business or pleasure - Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, India and Sri Lanka. And chillingly close to home was an outbreak in Guangzhou last year.
Infections have jumped from tens of thousands a year in the 1960s to between 50 million and 100 million a year, according to a recent article in medical journal The Lancet, with up to 500,000 cases of dengue haemorrhagic fever. While scientists are working to find a vaccine, The Lancet says, 'an effective, safe and affordable vaccine is not an immediate prospect'.
Julie Buckley, a Hong Kong bar manager, says she caught dengue fever several years ago during an extended stay in Lombok, Indonesia. 'How would I describe it? Just awful,' she says. 'Your bones ache, you come out in a rash all over your torso, you basically wish you were dead. It took about 10 days to get over the worst of it. I couldn't eat, didn't even want to drink water - until the doctor told me if I didn't get three litres of water down per day I'd be on a drip in two days and dead in three.' The sharp-snouted insects spreading dengue have become as urbanised as we are - unlike a couple of its rural cousins that are also vectors for the disease, Aedes aegypti thrives in cities, laying its eggs in flowerpots, cans, drums, tyres and anything else capable of pooling rainwater. It lays more than a hundred eggs at a time, meaning that in one summer, a single female can leave behind a couple of billion descendants.
While you would normally have to be stomping around in the jungle or roughing it in a rural village to encounter the Anopheles mosquito that spreads malaria, you could catch dengue sitting around the pool at a swish hotel.