Treating dengue more hard with growing obesity: experts

Dengue patients suffer from capillary permeability, when fluid escape from their blood vessels into surrounding tissues, causing breathing complexity and complications in major organs like the brain, liver and kidneys. "The virus has a crash on the wall of the capillaries and allow more fluids to go away the tubes and into the tissues," said Jeremy Farrar, tropical medicine professor and director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam. "The complication is lots of fluids in the lungs which create breathing difficult.

In people who have a high BMI (body mass index), their capillaries are essentially more likely to leak, so that is made worse in a dengue infection," Farrar told Reuters after addressing a communicable disease conference in Singapore. Dengue used to be a disease mainly among young children, but almost anyone is now vulnerable and infection numbers have shot up because of urbanization and the steady movement of people circumstances that allow the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries the virus, to thrive.

The World Health Organization estimate there is 50 million dengue infection worldwide each year. Among these are 500,000 harsh cases what is known as dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF). There are about 22,000 deaths yearly, mainly among children. Dengue is expensive, costing an average of US$1,394 for each hospitalized patient. At least 10 working days are lost in each case. About 2.5 billion people live in more than 100 endemic countries and area where dengue viruses can be transmit. There is now no cure or vaccine for dengue, although Sanofi Aventis SA has an applicant vaccine in the final stage of clinical development.

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WHO Outlines Strategy to Combat deserted Tropical Diseases

The international pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline publicize October 14 that it will donate 400 million more tablets for the treatment of intestinal worms in children. This comes as the World Health Organization is calling on drug companies to donate more tablets to help to eradicate tropical diseases. The WHO says in a latest report that one billion people in the world's poorest countries are chronically ill from tropical diseases that receive little notice from drug manufacturers and health organizations.

The diseases leishmanaisis, chagas, dengue and 14 others are unknown to several people in developed countries, or are thought to have been eradicated long ago. But the World Health Organization says they cause massive, hidden affliction that keeps millions of people in poverty. And the WHO is calling on governments, donors and pharmaceutical companies to help decrease those numbers significantly. Dr. Peter Hotez is a specialist in tropical diseases. He says that these parasitic diseases are rampant even though they are simply treatable.

"The neglected tropical disease program of USAID, which is also funded through global health initiative, in some cases can lead to the removal of some very important neglected tropical diseases such as lymphatic filariasis, perhaps river blindness and leprosy," he said. Dr. Hotez says that these diseases can often be treating with a single pill. But there is often is no funding for proven and cheap treatments. "Out of 10 billion exhausted annually, only 65 million, less than one percent, is spent on deserted tropical diseases. We have to begin bringing that up because these conditions are just as significant and we can do something about them through mass drug administration." 

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