On the way home from a vacation in New Zealand, Pamela Ferdinand stopped off in the Cook Islands, including Aitutaki. It seemed like an idyllic way to cap off her South Pacific holiday. She didn’t know an outbreak of dengue fever was hitting the region; she knew all too well after she returned home. As she writes in Sunday’s Washington Post, “The next week I lay in torment at my home in Cambridge, Mass., alternately suffering chills and sweats with excruciating joint pain, bleeding under the skin and severe dehydration that landed me in the hospital for nearly a week.” She recounts her painful recovery—she lost seven pounds along the way—and offers a fine overview of the mosquito-borne illness.

We’ll be hearing a lot more about dengue fever in the coming years, I suspect.

As we noted last month, it’s on the rise in Mexico and is expected to increase around the globe, thanks in part to global warming.

Fortunately, although dengue can be deadly, most people survive the illness.

One noteworthy anecdote for travelers to file away for future trips: “In the Cook Islands, we’d slathered on sunscreen by day and insect repellent by night, not realizing that the dengue-infected female Aedes mosquito bites at its peak in the morning and late afternoon.”

Photo by ÇP, via Flickr (Creative Commons).