No laughing matter HE SAYS Aldrin Cardon 09/08/2010

No laughing matter

HE SAYS

Aldrin Cardon

09/08/2010
His fever was high, and the chills it brought were standing in the way of his work. So, Garrick Utley, the now retired legendary world correspondent of the American television network NBC, had to visit a military doctor available in the camp to check on his condition.

He was told he had dengue — not malaria as he suspected — and was prescribed with aspirin, a lot of rest and was assured dengue doesn’t kill. He was wrongly diagnosed, as it turned out later, and Utley had to write about the this episode in his coverage of the Vietnam war as an anecdote to make his biography, You Should Have Been Here Yesterday, lighter somehow.

Utley no longer wrote about the American doctor’s other mistakes, such as his prescription of aspirin (which increases the tendency to bleed), and that dengue does not kill. That was in the late 1960s, when dengue was still a misunderstood disease.

Dengue is no longer considered incurable in these times, yet more and more Filipinos are dying of it even as our health authorities have once again raised the warning as a dramatic increase of more than 70 percent in dengue cases have been reported, including more deaths as a result of self and wrong prescription, oftentimes ignorance of the disease.

With poverty a factor in many cases in which dengue victims were no longer brought to hospitals, the Filipinos’ (as most Asian do) propensity to believe in the untested promises of herbal products add up to the confusion and misunderstanding of dengue and its cures..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100908com7.html