Don’t take dengue for granted: Lessons learned by a mother

MANILA, Philippines - Dengue, a potentially deadly viral disease spread through the bite of a dengue-carrying mosquito, can be a mother’s nightmare once her children become infected.

Mother Chichi Talosig learned from personal experience that dengue, which starts out as a seemingly ordinary bout with fever, should not be taken for granted.

For one thing, dengue is already a yearlong disease — no longer limited to just the wet season. Second, Filipino researchers discovered that, contrary to the popular belief that dengue mosquitoes only bite during the day, there is actually a dengue-carrying mosquito that bites aggressively at night.

Talosig thought at first that her two kids were just having the usual seasonal fever last August. Little did she know that they were already infected with the dengue virus.

“My daughter Ysa (Ysabel Pauline) texted me one day, saying she was feeling very weak. She could hardly walk. So she had to come home before school was dismissed,” she recalls.

Talosig thought that Ysa’s weakness was due to fatigue. Ysa, who’s in second year college at the University of Santo Tomas, is into taekwondo, and she had resumed training after a long lay-off.

The next day, Ysa had a high fever, peaking at 39.5 degrees Celsius. Then it went down a bit, the following day. However, just as Ysa’s fever went down, Talosig’s son, Kyle, also registered a fever of about 38 degrees Celsius.

When Chichi took her children to the doctor, the latter ordered a blood test to be done for both patients. While a normal platelet count would be about 150,000 to 450,000, Ysa’s blood count had dropped to as low as only 35,000 when the dengue was at its worst. Kyle’s blood count was not so bad at 180,000 — still normal but toward the lower end.  The two were given treatments to boost their immune system (since there’s really no drug available to cure dengue yet).

“Thank God that my kids did not need a transfusion and that their condition did not reach a really bad stage. I know that other dengue cases are so serious that some patients have to go to the ICU or even get comatose. We are blessed that Ysa and Kyle did not need transfusions. The doctor said that a milder type of dengue virus was probably responsible,” Talosig says.

“I always thought that dengue mosquitoes bite only during the day. Now that we know there’s a dengue mosquito that bites at night, then it means that we need to get longer-lasting and proven protection against it,” Talosig says.

Green Cross Insect Repellent Lotion is especially formulated to provide longer protection time against powerful dengue-carrying mosquito bites, up to 10-hour protection per application.

It is also the first clinically proven effective insect repellent lotion that protects against both daytime-biting and nighttime-biting dengue-carrying mosquitoes.