History of Dengue

Dengue fever has a long story. The disease has created hundreds of epidemics and pandemics, affecting millions of people throughout the world.

Dengue fever is a very old disease; the earliest known clinical descriptions of a dengue like illness are found in then Chinese literature during the Chin Dynasty (265-420 CE), Tang Dynasty ( 610 CE) and Northern Sung Dynasty (992 CE).

These reports described a disease called ‘water poison,’ due to its association with water associated flying insects and whose clinical description included fever, rash, arthralgia, myalgia and hemorrhagic manifestations.

There are reports of epidemics of dengue-like illness in the French West Indies in 1653 and in Panama in 1699.

It then fell silent, resting quietly until 1779, when the disease began to explode. Scientists then saw dengue in North America, Asia and Africa.

The first medically confirmed dengue epidemic came in 1818 when Peru was struck with 50,000 dengue cases.

Starting in the 16th century with the expansion of European colonialism and trade, Aedes aegypti spread around the world by hitching rides in water storage containers on boat.
The virus etiology of dengue fever was not documented until 1943-44, when Japanese and American scientists simultaneously isolated the viruses from soldiers in the Pacific and Asian theaters during Word War II.

Dengue was a major cause of morbidity among Allied and Japanese soldiers in the Pacific. The scientists were able to show that some virus strains from three geographic locations (Hawaii, New Guinea and India) were antigenetically similar.

This virus called dengue.

The term dengue was first used in Cuba in 1928 meaning ‘affected’. The Spanish term may have been based on the Swahili term ‘dinga’ or ‘dyenga’ meaning ‘a sudden cramp-like seizure’ used during chikungunya-like epidemics on the East Coasts of Africa in 1823.
History of Dengue