DENGUE (pronounced deng-ga)  , an infectious fever occurring in warm climates . The symptoms are a sudden attack of fever, accompanied by rheumatic pains in the joints and muscles with severe headache and erythema . After a few days a crisis is reached and an interval of two or three days is followed by a slighter return of fever and pain and an eruption resembling measles, the most marked characteristic of the disease . The disease is rarely fatal, death occurring only in cases of extreme weakness caused by old age, infancy or other illness . Little is known of the aetiology of " dengue." The virus is probably similar to that of other exanthematous fevers and communicated by an intermediary culex . The disease is nearly always epidemic, though at intervals it appears to be pandemic and in certain districts almost endemic . The area over which the disease ranges may be stated generally to be between 32° 47' N. and 23° 23' S . Throughout this area " dengue " is constantly epidemic . The earliest epidemic of which anything is known occurred in 1779–178o in Egypt and the East Indies . The chief epidemics have been those of 1824–1826 in India, and in the West Indies and the southern states of North America, of 1870-1875, extending practically over the whole of the tropical portions of the East and reaching as far as China . In 1888 and 1889 a great outbreak spread along the shores of the Aegean and over nearly the whole of Asia Minor . Perhaps " dengue " is most nearly endemic in equatorial East Africa and in the West Indies .

The word has usually been identified with the

Spanish dengue, meaning stiff or prim behaviour, and adopted in the West Indies as a name suit-able to the curious cramped movements of a sufferer from the disease, similar to the name " dandy-fever " which was given to it by the negroes . According to the New English Dictionary (quoting Dr Christie in The Glasgow Medical Journal, September 1881), both ".dengue " and " dandy " are corruptions of the Swahili word dinga or denga, meaning a sudden attack of cramp, the Swahili name for the disease being ka-dinga pepo . See Sir Patrick Manson, Tropical Diseases; a Manual of Diseases of Warm Climates (1903) .