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You need to hang in there because this is hard.
I had to stop working for a fortnight.
I was finding it hard to get up in the morning.
At some stage I was really feeling bad.
It took me 3 weeks to recover, to be able to do anything.
You are powerless. You wait and you’re there, powerless.
All hospital services were overwhelmed with the dengue fever.
First I had a fever, I was tired and then I couldn’t feel my legs.
I was really, really scared.
Transmitted by mosquitoes, dengue fever is present in more than one hundred countries.
It is a threat to nearly half of the world’s population.
Martinique is not immune.
In 2010, it was hit by the worst epidemic on record.
It must be said that dengue fever has the biggest impact on the population, with an attack rate of more than 10%.
Doctor Laurent Thomas (responsible for dengue fever emergency coordination in Martinique, Fort-de-France)
This is enormous: it means that 10% of the population has been affected by dengue fever this year.
This is therefore very worrying.
Karine: I called an ambulance to take me.
They kept me for 2 days.
In fact, initially they don’t want to keep people; there were too many patients.
Andréas’ mum: My God, there were even people queuing outside the emergency department.
Julien: In France you never hear anything about it, but out there, it was on the news all the time
you could see hospitals filling up.
All of a sudden the paediatric population suffering from dengue fever increased significantly.
And this put paediatric hospitals under pressure during the peak of the epidemic; for a week or two, we had to open an extra wing for children.
This was a first in Martinique.
Kewan: They put stickers on my stomach, my arms and my legs.
After this, they pulled them off and they put me in a room.
When I sleep at night, my stomach hurts.
Kewan’s mum: Even in the hospital, where he stayed for nearly 4 days, his temperature wasn’t dropping.
There is no efficient drug; they just give them something to ease the pain, and that’s all.
It’s going to be more and more serious for kids.
There will be more and more cases, in increasingly severe forms.
As there are 4 different virus serotypes, when you are infected with a virus, you become definitively immune to this particular virus but you remain exposed to infections by the other viruses.
Therefore, in theory, you can have dengue fever 4 times in your life. I, myself, have had it 3 times here in Martinique in 25 years.
It was atrocious. You can scream, you can moan, you can do anything you want, you’re still in pain.
I told myself that I couldn’t take it any more, that I would die. Because I felt so… on top of that, I tend to lose weight fairly rapidly. So, after 3 days, I had melted away.
Benoît: And my temperature rose, dropped, rose again, dropped again. I was so tired all the time.
This fatigue goes beyond the acute phase of dengue fever. Some patients, after catching dengue fever, can have a chronic fatigue syndrome that can last for months.
Eric: In fact I was too exhausted to realise. I slept all the time, I was only awake a few hours a day. I was massively dehydrated, I vomited a lot.
I had booked my flight on line so I had no information on mosquitoes in Martinique. I had never heard of dengue fever; I wasn’t at all familiar with the disease.
Hélène: You think that dengue fever has consequences for people who are a bit…
who have a physiological pathology, but I was perfectly healthy when I caught it.
I originally had a slipped disc which required emergency surgery.
And during the operation I developed dengue hemorrhagic fever which led to a drop in platelets and a compressive haematoma which compressed my nerves,
resulting in total paralysis of the lower limbs.
The biggest pitfall with dengue fever, the major difficulty,
is that despite the existing correlation between the warning signs and the evolution into severe forms,
a lot of patients still go directly from apparently uncomplicated dengue fever to a sudden aggravation which can kill them in a matter of hours.
Thank God he’s still here, but it must be so *** the parents... Especially for a simple mosquito bite.