The Dengi Mystery
Another day, another story. This one is about sickness and disease. I hope you enjoy it. A few days after my last letter, Greg (the other shelter engineer) got sick. We were supposed to go down to the beach to while away yet another Sunday. However, Greg was not feeling too well that morning and felt he should hang back and just rest up at home. So I went down to the beach alone and had a really nice day, thank you. When I came back that afternoon, Greg was lying in the middle of the living room moaning. It seems that a pretty bad fever had set in. He was not taking any anti-malaria drugs, and we both kind of assumed that malaria is what he probably had. I went to find one of the MDM Portugal doctors to take a look at him. It was a bit after 5:00pm before they were able to get away from the hospital. They took one look at him and said he looked pretty bad. They took a malarial slide and contacted the Korean medics about evacuation.
The Koreans showed up about 7:00pm with an IV drip for re-hydration and told us that was all they could do until the morning. The MDM doctors then got mad at the Koreans. MDM insisted that he be hospitalized, but the Koreans refused to take civilians into their hospital if there is an operational hospital in the vicinity. The problem is the hospital in Los Palos has no trained staff after 5:00pm, no electricity after 10:00pm, and like most third world hospitals can be more dangerous than staying at home. So that is exactly what Greg ended up doing. It was decided that he would stay in his room, they would hook up the IV to his mosquito net, and I would stay up all night and would make sure that he did not fall asleep! So, I spent the entire evening burning through the last of my computer's battery, burning through the last of my flashlight batteries, playing solitaire by candle light, and trying to maintain a conversation with a half delirious invalid. At 6:00am, just as I was deciding if I should kill Greg and get some sleep, the Korean medics showed up. They changed the IV, threw him into the ambulance, got him out to the airstrip and onto a special medical evacuation flight to Dili. I went back to bed.
Greg was held in Dili for a day before he was able to catch a flight out to Darwin, Australia. There he was taken to a hospital and re-tested. It turns out that he tested negative for malaria, which immediately makes those folks who are educated in these matter think "Dengi." It's this wonderful one-two punch! The night mosquitoes give you malaria and the day shift gives you Dengi. Both diseases can be deadly and both definitely make you feel like hell. Dengi however, is harder to test for and is sometimes called "break bone disease". (You can imagine why).
As it turns out, he also tested negative for Dengi, which brings us to the mystery! When I got back to Dili I heard that quite a few people were also falling ill to a very Dengi like disease. Some of those folks tested negative for Dengi and some would test positive, but the symptoms were always the same. They would get a very high fever with intermittent chills, and they would feel like someone shattered each bone in their body, tossed them all in a sack and backed over the sack with a truck. They would get a nasty full body rash, and they would sleep for as much as twenty hours at a time. No one said it was a pleasant experience.
Here is the scary thing! After Greg got better and came back to Los Palos, Jesse (our health coordinator) fell ill with the Dengi-like mystery disease. That same week we got a call from Judith, our country director who was home in Ireland for the holidays. She had to push back her return date, because she was in the hospital with what they thought might be Dengi. Then Anika, our grants coordinator, didn't show up before the New Year as planned. It turned out she could not fly back from her home in Helsinki because she too was sick. Then just last week Greg got sick again, and people started to freak out. This week we've lost Susan, the education coordinator, and Peter, the assistant country director.
Here are some interesting facts: Over 40% of our staff have been medically evacuated in the past month. In 1998 the hospital in Darwin reported 1 case of confirmed Dengi. In all of 1999 there were 15 cases. In the first four days of the year 2000 there were 18 cases reported, and that's only counting those cases that tested positive for Dengi. Yikes! I'm figuring it's just a matter of time, and frankly I don't have the time right now to lay in bed for two weeks. I've got shelter materials arriving!
Oh, by the way - I feel fine! (Knock on wood!). It's funny though; if you're in Dili and you've just woken up from a nap, and you've got that morning face kind of look - everyone around you becomes immediately concerned, and you must either wake up quickly or explain to five people that you are indeed fine and that frankly you just look like crap.