People are suffering intense headaches, a burning fever and pain in their joints they can hardly walk or use their hands. It’s like having a terrible flu combined with a sudden case of arthritis and the decease is still not known. This is not a scene of Bollywood movie, this is actually happening in Caribbean.

“You feel it in your bones, your fingers and your hands. It’s like everything is coming apart,” a patient describes his situation while sitting for her turn in San Cristobal hospital.

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Hospitals, medical centers and clinics throughout the Caribbean are seeing thousands of people with the same symptoms, victims of a virus with a long and unfamiliar name that has been spread rapidly by mosquitoes across the islands after the first locally transmitted case was confirmed in December.

The cause is a virus called chikungunya, derived from an African word that loosely translates as “contorted with pain.” People encountering it in the Caribbean for the first time say the description is fitting. While the virus is rarely fatal it is extremely debilitating.

Outbreaks of the virus have long made people miserable in Africa and Asia. But for Caribbean it is new, with the first locally transmitted case documented in December in French St. Martin, likely brought in by an infected air traveler.

Health officials are now working feverishly to educate the public about the illness, knock down the mosquito population, and deal with an onslaught of cases. There have been no confirmed cases of local transmission but experts say the high number of travelers to the county means that could change earlier.

An estimated 60% to 90% of those infected show symptoms, compared to around 20% for dengue, which is common in the county. There is no vaccine and the only cure is treatment for the pain and fluid loss.

According to Nasci, chief of a CDC branch that tracks insect-borne diseases, “With the increase in travelers the likelihood that something like this would happen goes up and eventually it did. We ended up with somebody at the right time and the right place infecting mosquitoes. What we’re seeing now is an increase in the number of infected travelers coming from the Caribbean, which is expected because there’s a lot of U.S. travel, a lot of vacation travel, a lot of work travel. The evidence suggests that once you get it and recover, once your immune system clears the virus you are immune for life”.

We cannot ban the outsiders to visit the Caribbean. Jacqueline Medina, a specialist at the Instituto Technologico University in the Dominican Republic stated that, “It’s building up like a snowball because of the constant movement of people”