CHIKUNGUNYA VIRUS: 'It is terrible'.... Painful and rapid spread of new virus in Caribbean....They suffer searing headaches, a burning fever and so much pain in their joints they can barely walk or use their hands. It's like having a terrible flu combined with an abrupt case of arthritis.

By EZEQUIEL ABIU LOPEZ  Friday, May 23, 2014    

SAN CRISTOBAL, Dominican Republic (AP) — They suffer searing headaches, a burning fever and so much pain in their joints they can barely walk or use their hands. It's like having a terrible flu combined with an abrupt case of arthritis.

In this May 15, 2014 photo, five-year-old Karla Sepulveda,
who suffers chikungunya fever symptoms, waits with her
 grandmother for treatment in the paediatric area of a public
 hospital in the coastal town of Boca Chica, Dominican Republic.
The mosquito-borne virus, common in Africa and Asia, arrived
in the Caribbean in late 2013 and has affected more than
 10,000 people in the Dominican Republic. (PHOTO: AP)

Hospitals and clinics throughout the Caribbean are seeing thousands of people with the same symptoms, victims of a virus with a long and unfamiliar name that has been spread rapidly by mosquitoes across the islands after the first locally transmitted case was confirmed in December.

"You feel it in your bones, your fingers and your hands. It's like everything is coming apart," said 34-year-old Sahira Francisco as she and her daughter waited for treatment at a hospital in San Cristobal, a town in the southern Dominican Republic that has seen a surge of the cases in recent days.

The virus is chikungunya, derived from an African word that loosely translates as "contorted with pain". People encountering it in the Caribbean for the first time say the description is fitting. While the virus is rarely fatal it is extremely debilitating.

"It is terrible, I have never in my life gotten such an illness," said Maria Norde, a 66-year-old woman confined to bed at her home on the lush eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. "All my joints are in pain."

Outbreaks of the virus have long made people miserable in Africa and Asia. But it is new to the Caribbean, with the first locally transmitted case documented in December in French St Martin, likely brought in by an infected air traveller. Health officials are now working feverishly to educate the public about the illness, knock down the mosquito population, and deal with an onslaught of cases. more