Dengue fever and dengue virus: a challenge to tropical medicine.

This series of papers will present an overview on dengue fever and dengue viruses. i.e., history, symptomatology, pathology, virus isolation, basic properties of viruses, pathogenesis, prevention, epidemiology, etc.The present issue consists of two chapters. The first chapter contains such sections as : historical aspects, relatedness to other arboviruses, nomenclature and classification.The second chapter describes big dengue epidemics which occurred in Japan during 1942-1945. Port cities such as Nagasaki and Kobe were heavily infected. The first onset was among seamen of cargo boats which were connecting those port cities and Southern areas such as Philippine Islands, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Guinea, etc. About two hundred thousand typical cases were reported and the whole number of patients including abortive and unrecorded ones were probably much greater. This was the first and only outbreak of dengue fever in Japanese main islands and also one of the grearest dengue epidemics ever recorded in the temperate regions.Chapters describing the other items will follow in later issues of this Journal.