Clinical and epidemiologic characteristics associated with dengue fever in Mombasa, Kenya
International Journal of Infectious Diseases·
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.08.074
- PMID
- 32891734
- PMCID
- PMC7670221
- OpenAlex
- W3083747478
- Study type
- Journal article
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Article type
- journal-article
- Integrity
- current
Why this research matters now
The abstract suggests substantial dengue transmission in Mombasa and indicates a need for additional data to better understand disease burden and improve case detection for surveillance and outbreak monitoring.
Structured evidence summary
Research question
The study aimed to estimate the share of febrile patients who were dengue-positive in Mombasa and to identify clinical features linked with dengue.
Study design
This was passive, health facility-based fever surveillance. Acute and convalescent blood samples were collected and tested with dengue RDT, RT-PCR in a subset, and IgM/IgG ELISA.
Population and setting
Non-malarial febrile patients aged 1 to 55 years were enrolled at three health facilities in Mombasa, Kenya, from March 2016 to May 2017.
Main findings
Among 482 enrollees, 295 were dengue-positive by laboratory results. Positivity was higher during the April-May 2017 outbreak period than outside it, and dengue status was associated with rash, fatigue, headache, retro-orbital pain, nausea or vomiting, nose bleeding, gum bleeding, loss of appetite, myalgia, and arthralgia. Most cases were mild, with two needing observation and no dengue hemorrhagic fever reported.
Public-health relevance
The abstract suggests substantial dengue transmission in Mombasa and indicates a need for additional data to better understand disease burden and improve case detection for surveillance and outbreak monitoring.
Important limitations
The evidence comes from passive health facility-based surveillance at three sites, so it reflects care-seeking febrile patients rather than a population-wide sample. The abstract also indicates that more data are needed for burden and case-detection interpretation, and the summary is limited to the supplied abstract and metadata.
GIDS interpretation
This article is discoverable as a dengue surveillance and outbreak-related study from Kenya, with relevance to febrile illness monitoring and laboratory-confirmed dengue characterization. It should be treated as a single-study evidence item, not as confirmation of any live surveillance signal.
Related GIDS surveillance
Literature context does not validate, explain, or change a surveillance signal. Exact and contextual relationships are shown separately.
Evidence relationships
This article has 12 auditable classifier relationships to diseases, places, topics, and study design.