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

The First Outbreak of the IllnessIt was a piano dull afternoon when they brought the first victim into the Emergency Room. He was a sonish 15 year-old, an adolescent sheep herder who appeared to be suffering from an unco high fever accompanied by delirium. His uncle, the only relative to follow the son, said that his nephew was in good spirits until a few old age 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-Arabian Arabia just about the Yemen border. It was earlier August 2000, and I was in Jazan as a participating atomic number 101 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 pedigree culture. Though this area of Saudi Arabia was similar to home in climate, it didnt serve well ... 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 arrogate his dehydration, I had the boy x-rayed to see if I could find anything beyond the find of his quickly-failing, physical condition. Upon review of the patients cranial x-rays, it was found that there was swelling of the wiz (encephalitis) along with kidney damage. Sadly, the boy was pronounced dead two days later, and with my softness to find a cure for him, the hospital was suddenly facing an exponential function amount of patients suffering from the same condition. Desperate to find a clue, my coadjutor doctors and I spent whatever time available studying the induce 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, reason out another diagnosis--Rift vale Fever. According to the World Health Organization, Rift Valley Fever (RVF) was isolated in 1930 during an