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

The scratch line Outbreak of the IllnessIt was a quietly dull afternoon when they brought the depression victim into the Emergency Room. He was a boyish 15 year-old, an girlish sheep herder who appeared to be suffering from an unusually high fever tended to(p) by delirium. His uncle, the only relative to accompany the boy, said that his nephew was in near spirits until a a couple of(prenominal) days prior when his health cursorily deteriorated. I was a visiting doctor from Peru and the boy reminded me of home, where a majority of my puerility neighbors raised sheep upon the Altiplano. The hospital in which the boy was received was King Fahad of import 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 mendelevium in the first physician exchange weapons platform between the Saudi and Peruvian governments. My admission into this program was due to my youth, my speci alization in pediatrics, and my familiarity with livestock culture. Though this area of Saudi Arabia was similar to home in climate, it didnt help ... that the language of these indigenous pack 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 perceive if I could find anything beyond the surface of his quickly-failing, physical condition. Upon review of the patients cranial x-rays, it was found that there was swelling of the brain (encephalitis) along with kidney damage. Sadly, the boy was pronounce dead two days later, and with my inability to find a bring around for him, the hospital was suddenly facing an exponential amount of patients suffering from the homogeneous condition. Desperate to find a clue, my fellow doctors and I spent some(prenominal) time available studying the cause for this mysterious illness. The most uncouth factors betwee n 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 diagnosis--Rift Valley Fever. gibe to the World Health Organization, Rift Valley Fever (RVF) was isolated in 1930 during an