“I thought I had the flu, but it was a heavier kind of flu,” says Potter, 34, who had been flying home to Rochester, New York, after a weeklong vacation in Key West. “I was achy. I had a headache. I was kind of disoriented.”
Her symptoms weren’t from the flu, as it turns out. They were the early signs of dengue fever, a viral disease native to the tropics but incredibly rare in the continental U.S. — so rare that it took two weeks, three visits to the doctor, and one trip to the emergency room before experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally identified what ailed her, in September 2009.
Potter is the first known victim of a dengue fever outbreak that has since led to more than two dozen confirmed cases in Key West, and, health officials fear, may be headed north.
Read the full story at http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/07/22/dengue.fever/?hpt=Sbin#fbid=rST3EHDRr8F
