Research on dengue and dengue-like illness in East Asia and the Western Pacific during the First Half of the 20th century

Abstract

Dengue has become an enormous medical problem worldwide since the end of the World War II (WWII). Despite a voluminous amount of research conducted worldwide for many years to elucidate the mechanism of the development of the two severe forms of dengue (dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF) and dengue shock syndrome (DSS)), to develop effective vaccines and to design reliable disease control and prevention strategies, the goals of achieving these objectives are not in sight yet. For such a medical research that requires a multi-directional approach to resolve a variety of research questions, sometimes it is necessary to step back and re-examine historically how the current status of the expanding global problems and sudden emergence of severe forms of dengue have evolved in the first place. To examine the history of dengue epidemiology, it is first necessary to put in perspective all relevant documents, including a large number of nearly forgotten, old Japanese publications regarding dengue outbreaks and allied background information in East Asia and the Western Pacific that were documented before the emergence of the haemorrhagic disease outbreaks in the 1950s there. The compiled data in this review, thus, fill in for the first time many blanks in the early epidemiologic history of dengue in this part of the world. Besides the data for epidemiologists, virologic data, clinical studies of haemorrhagic manifestation, significance in military medicine and entomologic investigations covered in this review should be useful for the current researchers investigating any of those subjects.