The First Outbreak of the Illness :: Medicine Medical Influenza Essays

The First Outbreak of the Illness It was a quietly dull afternoon when they brought the first victim into the Emergency Room. He was a boyish 15 year-old, an adolescent sheep herder who appeared to be suffering from an unusually high fever accompanied by delirium. His uncle, the only relative to accompany the boy, said that his nephew was in good spirits until a few days prior when his health quickly deteriorated. [I was] a visiting doctor from Peru [and] the boy reminded me of home, where a majority of my childhood neighbors raised sheep upon the Altiplano. The hospital in which the boy was received was King Fahad Central Hospital in the town of Jazan, a small city in southwest Saudi Arabia near the Yemen border. It was early August 2000, and I was in Jazan as a participating physician in the first physician exchange program between the Saudi and Peruvian governments. My admission into this program was due to my youth, my specialization in pediatrics, and my familiarity with livestock culture. Though this are a of Saudi Arabia was similar to home in climate, it didn't help ... that the language of these indigenous people was so difficult to interpret. Thank Allah that I was surrounded by a sympathetic hospital staff. After administering fluids to relieve his dehydration, I had the boy x-rayed to see if I could find anything beyond the surface of his quickly-failing, physical condition. Upon review of the patient's cranial x-rays, it was found that there was swelling of the brain (encephalitis) along with kidney damage. Sadly, the boy was pronounced dead two days later, and with my inability to find a cure for him, the hospital was suddenly facing an exponential amount of patients suffering from the same condition. Desperate to find a clue, my fellow doctors and I spent whatever time available studying the cause for this mysterious illness. The most common factors between these patients were that all of them were herdsmen who happened to graze their sheep near a wadi (seasonal watercourse) a few miles north of Jazan. Instantly we assumed that this was a new, aggressive form of malaria with the vector being a mosquito. However, another colleague, Dr. Muhammad Almaradni, concluded another diag nosis--Rift Valley Fever. According to the World Health Organization, Rift Valley Fever (RVF) was isolated in 1930 during an