It took a week or so for the virus to do its work. Once in Jones’s bloodstream, it latched onto her white blood cells and began replicating. She was watering plants when she felt light-headed, and then developed a fever. “I knew something weird was going on,” she told me. Rashes. Pain behind her eyes. And bone-break ache in her joints. “I felt like I was a ninety-nine-year-old lady who had been hit by a truck,” she said. In rare cases, dengue can escalate to brain swelling and bleeding, which can be fatal (about ten thousand people a year die from dengue).
