History

Etymology

The origins of the word "dengue" are not clear, but one theory is that it is derived from the Swahili phrase Ka-dinga pepo, which describes the disease as being caused by an evil spirit. The Swahili word dinga may possibly have its origin in the Spanish word dengue meaning fastidious or careful, which would describe the gait of a person suffering the bone pain of dengue fever. Alternatively, the use of the Spanish word may derive from the similar-sounding Swahili. Slaves in the West Indies who contracted dengue were said to have the posture and gait of a dandy, and the disease was known as "dandy fever".

The term "break-bone fever" was first applied by physician and Founding Father Benjamin Rush, in a 1789 report of the 1780 epidemic in Philadelphia. In the report he uses primarily the more formal term "bilious remitting fever". The term dengue fever only came into general use after 1828. Other historical terms include "breakheart fever" and "la dengue". Terms for severe disease include: infectious thrombocytopenic purpura and Philippine, Thai, or Singapore hemorrhagic fever.

Discovery

The first record of a case of probable dengue fever is in a Chinese medical encyclopedia from the Jin Dynasty (265–420 AD) which referred to a "water poison" associated with flying insects.There have been descriptions of epidemics in the 17th century, but the most plausible early reports of dengue epidemics are from 1779 and 1780, when an epidemic swept Asia, Africa and North America. From that time until 1940, epidemics were infrequent.

In 1906, transmission by the Aedes mosquitoes was confirmed, and in 1907 dengue was the second disease (after yellow fever) that was shown to be caused a virus. Further investigations by John Burton Cleland and Joseph Franklin Siler completed the basic understanding of dengue transmission.

The marked rise of spread of dengue during and after the Second World War has been attributed to ecologic disruption. The same trends also led to the spread of different serotypes of the disease to different areas, and the emergence of dengue hemorrhagic fever, which was first reported in the Philippines in 1953. In the 1970s, it became a major cause of child mortality. Around the same time it emerged in the Pacific and the Americas, and the epidemic has been spreading since then.

Source: Wikipedia