dengue fever
© Unknown
The number of deaths from a dengue fever outbreak in northeastern Brazil has reached 30, according to statistics from the country's Health Ministry.

The latest reported death was that of a 5-year-old boy being cared for in the hospital in the city of Itabuna in Brazil's Atlantic coast state of Bahia.

According to health ministry statistics released on Thursday, 32,000 people in Bahia, around 65% of the state's population, have been registered with dengue fever. This is a 305% increase from last year.

Dengue is passed from human to human via mosquitoes or by blood transfusions and its symptoms are a sudden onset of severe headache, high fever, muscle and joint pains, which is often diagnosed as influenza. It is also known as break-bone fever and bonecrusher disease because of the severe pain in joints.

The first recognized Dengue epidemics occurred almost simultaneously in Asia, Africa, and North America in the 1780s, shortly after the identification and naming of the disease in 1779. Epidemic dengue has become more common since the 1980s. By the late 1990s, dengue was the most important mosquito-borne disease affecting humans after malaria, with around 40 million cases of dengue fever registered annually.