The chairman of the seminary council, Professor Dr. Tan Chong Tin, came to the seminary this afternoon to give a talk on the Chikugunya outbreak that we experienced for the past few weeks.
Though the health department, after much investigation, said that the source of the infection was neither from the resort that we stayed in Pangkor, nor the seminary, we are very certain that the the resort was the culprit. This is because no symptom is displayed for those who didn't join the camp.
Dr. Tan said that though Chikugunya is less life threatening than denggi fever, its side effect is more serious and would last for a long period of time. A lot of students and lecturers experienced a relapse after getting well for a few days; having fever, body ache, joint pain and vomiting.
Something very strange happened to four of the lecturers and students - all of them contracted a swollen jaw. Dr. Tan said that this is the first time ever in medial history that he saw such a symptom. It is never reported in whatever medical journals that such symptom exists due to a virus infection. A student with the most swollen jaw was admitted to the hospital to do a series of tests including biopsy and MRI in an effort to find the cause of the disease.
In fact, the symptoms of the infection is not due to the virus, but the body response to the virus. We were told that the virus was normally cleared by the body immune system in 3 or 4 days , and by the time the symptom appeared, there was no more virus in the body. This is a challenge that the medical team has to address, as they can't isolate any virus from the body to identify the cause of the virus.
The virus is having some structure identical to the structure of the body. The body developed antibody to attack the virus, but at the same time the antibody also attack the body because it can't distinguish which structure belonged to body and which one belong to the virus. In other words, this is a collateral damage.
We normally said that those with stronger immune system will demonstrate less or no symptom (side effect) , but with the above understanding, we should reverse our thinking that, those without symptom are those who have weaker immune system. Therefore, we shall not try to boost our immune system as a stronger immune system will bring heavier damage to the body :-(
This is similar to the graft versus host disease that I had to manage after the bone marrow transplant, in which the body immune system has to be suppressed to avoid organs being damaged. I took immunosuppressant drugs such as Cyclosporin and Prednisolon (setroid) for a few years to tame my immune system to make sure that it doesn't behave so aggressively. Can Prednisolon be used to treat those with serious side effect?
Some symptoms of the Chikugunya in this outbreak were not the same as the standard one. This leads Dr. Tan to believe that the one that we had might be a mutated strain of Chikugunya. However, the actual cause can only be determined when the medical team isolated the virus. Dr. Tan believed some of the relapses with serious symptoms such as swollen jaw must be due to revived virus in the body, and these people now become precious "specimens" since we might be able to find the virus in their body :-)
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| Professor Dr. Tan is speaking with Dr. Horis Ho as the translator |
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