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In the Grip Again

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I’ve had dengue. Once more, it has graced me with its unwelcome presence — the second such visitation, and one I could well have done without. The fever was mercifully mild, hardly worth noting. But the itching — dear God, the itching — it was as though my entire being were begging to be scratched. Hands, feet, even the genitals clamoured in unison, each demanding attention with a kind of maddening urgency.

Unlike the first bout, there was no dramatic onset to herald the illness. No high temperatures, no conspicuous pain. It was the pruritus alone — insistent and unrelenting — that finally betrayed the virus’s return. I worked through the week in stoic ignorance, chalking up the fatigue to the usual flurry of daily demands. I was, perhaps, a touch more irritable than usual; my thinking occasionally stumbled, like a foot catching the edge of a rug. Yet in the absence of fever and with joint pain too faint to raise suspicion, I all but overlooked the presence of the disease.

Dengue, of course, is no stranger to Brazil — a longstanding adversary, deeply embedded in the nation's epidemiological history. Public efforts to curtail it have been, by and large, tepid and inconsistent, achieving limited and transient victories. There is, fortunately, a vaccine — though in the chaos of modern life, it lingers at the periphery of memory, little more than a well-meant intention, shelved and half-forgotten.
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