Mosquito-born chikungunya virus spreads in Caribbean

A painful mosquito-born virus spreading quickly through the Caribbean is causing alarm in Haiti and neighboring Dominican Republic, where health officials are scrambling to respond to a surge of new patients.

Hospitals and clinics in the region are seeing thousands of people with the same symptoms, victims of a virus with a long and unfamiliar name that has been spread rapidly across the islands after the first locally transmitted case was confirmed in December.

Since then, it has jumped from island to island, sending thousands of patients to the hospital with painful joints, pounding headaches and spiking fevers.

"You feel it in your bones, your fingers and your hands. It's like everything is coming apart," 34-year-old Sahira Francisco told the Associated Press as she and her daughter waited for treatment at a hospital in San Cristobal, a town in the southern Dominican Republic that has seen a surge of the cases in recent days.

Chikungunya is a virus more commonly found in Africa and Asia and transmitted by the same daytime-biting aedes aegypti mosquito that causes the more deadly dengue fever.

"These mosquitoes know no borders," Phyllis Kozarsky, a physician with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta told Reuters.

Seven deaths have been associated with the virus, but those people likely suffered from other health problems, health officials say. Chikungunya, while extremely debilitating, is normally not deadly and symptoms begin to dissipate within a week.

The name chikungunya is derived from an African word that loosely translates as "contorted with pain." People encountering it in the Caribbean for the first time say the description is fitting.   

"It is terrible, I have never in my life gotten such an illness," said Maria Norde, a 66-year-old woman confined to bed at her home on the lush eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. "All my joints are in pain."

The Pan-American Health Organization reports more than 55,000 suspected and confirmed cases in the Caribbean. Officials say the number is likely much higher due to unreported cases. Florida health officials have confirmed at least three cases.

In Haiti, where the virus was first detected early this month, the Health Ministry estimates 5,500 people have been sickened.

"My 22-year-old son is brave, but now he's crying like a kid. His arms, his neck, his back, every part of his body is in pain," said Marco Dorival in Port-au-Prince.

There is no vaccine or treatment that can cure the virus. Paracetamol, an over-the-counter painkiller, is used to treat high fevers.

The price of the medication has doubled in Haiti, leading the Ministry of Health to order 400,000 doses of acetaminophen, the ingredient in many non-prescription painkillers, be distributed around the country.

World Health Organization (WHO) representatives in Haiti said chikungunya will continue to spread as the mosquitoes breed in standing water and open water containers used in many Haitian homes that lack running water.

"Thirty to 35 percent of the population will get sick," WHO representative Dr. Jean-Luc Poncelet said.

Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic said they would spray pesticides to kill mosquitoes and urged residents to destroy breeding grounds, such as pools of standing water.

Wire services