I moved to the beach in Costa Rica and immediately contracted another tropical bone breaking fever. Whether it was Chikungunya or Dengue Fever, I’m not sure and didn’t need a doctor to tell me because the prescribed treatment is the same and super lame: rest, drink coconut water or suero (electrolytes), and take acetaminophen for the intense pain. Most doctors say there is no cure, but there is a cure for the symptoms of Dengue and Chikungunya in the juice of green papaya leaves.
The remedy is easy to make, inexpensive, and positive results have been noted in many scientific studies (see references below) and countless word of mouth stories here at the beach in Costa Rica.
Scroll down to read about how I made the juice and to get papaya leaf juice recipe ideas. It’s labor intensive and has to be done in a specific way to get the benefits.
What is Dengue Fever?
Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne tropical disease caused by the dengue virus. Symptoms include an intense recurring fever, a splitting headache, extreme muscle and joint pain, and a very noticeable skin rash, followed by weeks of extreme fatigue caused by low white blood cell and platelet counts. The disease is spread by one of those black and white striped mosquitos, Aedes aegypti.
What is Chikungunya?
Chikungunya is an infection caused by the chikungunya virus and also spread by mosquito bite. It is so similar to Dengue Fever that the descriptions of each could easily be interchanged, especially since so little is really known about either and symptoms vary from person to person.
I’ve heard more than one person say “Everyone’s Dengue is different.” The only commonality is that it sucks.

Papaya trees are easy to spot – long skinny trunks with diamond or heart-shaped patterns, and a big bushy top. Like palm trees, but with short flat leaves and papaya fruit of course!
What it feels like to have tropical bone-breaking fever
I woke up in the middle of the night with a pain so intense behind my eyeballs that I couldn’t see, my joints felt like they were being stabbed with knives and pried apart, and my body temperature was wavering between hot as lava and cold as ice. The fever kept me in bed, but I had a tiny bit of energy to walk around and do routine things like shower, at first.
After a few days of gorging on coconut water and taking the only medicine that helped, acetaminophen, the fever broke but the body pain remained. Every day that I woke up offered up a different painful surprise. One day my joints were in so much pain that I couldn’t walk, another day the blinding headache was back, and another day my muscles were so tight that I couldn’t straighten my legs to stand up. As the body aches subsided, funky side effects crept in like the chicken pox-like rash which quickly spread from head to toe, 2 more nights of sweaty painless fever, giant swollen lymph nodes on the entire left side of my head, and unbearably itchy hands.
As the weird body sensations subsided, exhaustion set in. About a week in to it, I barely woke up. I had absolutely no energy. The only thing that roused me from bed was a bursting bladder. Walking down the stairs to the bathroom caused my legs to burn with exertion, my heart rate to soar, and my head to swim with the promise of passing out. I would fall asleep after eating because my body couldn’t handle the energy required to be awake and digest food at the same time.
After watching me decline instead of improve, one of my roommates suggested I try the juice from papaya leaves, both of us skeptical, but I was desperate to try anything.
The effects were almost instantaneous. I drank a couple shots of the extremely bitter leaf juice, passed out for a couple of hours, and then woke up feeling a spike in my energy level. The juice increases levels of red and white blood cells as well as platelets. I want to call it a miracle cure, but that feels a little ridiculous because it’s juice from a plant that grows like a weed in many parts of Costa Rica. It’s a natural cure and it’s free.
How to make papaya leaf cure for Dengue and Chikungunya
First, find someone to help you. If you have Dengue, you don’t have energy to do this.
- To start, you’ll need at least 12 big papaya leaves (for 2 days of treatment), grab more if you have a fridge or freezer to store the rest of the juice in. The more the better, especially if you have a juicer that doesn’t juice greens very efficiently. It’s very important that they are green (not young or dry yellow leaves) and fresh. Do not boil or cook them to make a tea. You need to extract the juice for maximum potency.
- Cut the inside sections of the leaves away from the stems. You’re only going to use the leaf part, no stems.
- There are 2 ways to get the juice out of the leaf:
- Juicer: Put the papaya leaf in first under other fruits and veggies. The other ingredients are to push the leaves all the way through the juicer and to mask the bitter taste. At first, I only added carrots and cucumber and shot the gag reflex-inducing bitter juice like it was cheap, nasty liquor. After gaining some energy back from the papaya leaf treatment, I experimented with papaya leaf juice recipes by adding apples, beats, carrots, cucumber, ginger, and pineapple. That made a bigger, better-tasting, nutrient-packed smoothie.
- Blender: Blend the leaf sections as fine as your blender will allow. Pour all of that in to a coffee sock or cheesecloth and squeeze the juice out. Then shoot it, mix it with other juices, or make a smoothie with it.
- Take between 1 and 2 tablespoons of pure juice 3 times a day (morning, noon, night) until you feel like you’re 100% again. After I started feeling better, I made a big batch of pure papaya leaf juice and poured it in to an ice cube tray and froze it. To drink, I added 2 cubes to a smoothie with ginger and other fruits and veggies. For me, ginger was the key ingredient in masking the bitterness.
Expected Results
I felt better within a few hours and back to 100% in a few days. Everyone’s body chemistry is different, so results should be different although I haven’t heard a story yet of papaya leaves not helping. The papaya leaf reportedly works by increasing the immune system’s response to the virus, not by directly attacking the virus. This is super cool because that implies that papaya leaves could be effective on other viruses, too. I am going to test it out next time I get a cold.
UPDATE: I had the opportunity to test the papaya leaves on a regular cold – I was coming down with a cold. I could feel my energy levels decrease and my tonsils swell up in the telltale sign that I was about to get sick. I immediately started the papaya leaf treatment. I took it twice a day for 3 days and I did not get sick.
Disclaimer: Doctors and health organizations do not recognize papaya leaves as a cure or treatment, despite positive results from scientific studies. I’m sure they’ll recognize it when the pharmaceutical companies figure out a way to profit from it. In the meantime, try this at your own risk. I’m not a doctor.
References
Does Carica papaya leaf-extract increase the platelet count? An experimental study in a murine model
Whenever you write about your fever, my heart breaks for you. It sounds so horrible – I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I’ve never heard of taking papaya leaves but that sounds incredible. It’s amazing how fast some natural remedies work. I’d been dealing with a parasite in my stomach for over a year and had taken all the medicine doctors could throw at me but it still kept coming back. Then my friend Eduardo’s mother sent over a big bag of avocado leaves with instructions to make tea with it. After that, I never had stomach problems again and the parasite was gone.
That’s awesome, I’ll have to remember the avocado leaves next time I have parasites. Thanks!
Thank you for sharing Erin. The article was well written and presented. I saved your web site for future reference.
John Frigault
Junquillal, Costa Rica
Gracias!
hola Erin, he escuchado mucho sobre las bondades de las hojas de Papaya, gracias por la info…para tomarlo en cuenta.
Humberto
Uvita, Osa, Costa Rica.
Con gusto!
Super helpful. Thanks!
Thanks a lot – I will surely test it, if I am attacked again by Chikungunya. I have been living without any pharmaceutical/chemical medicaments since more than 10 years. Since 2004, I do not have any health insurance anymore – which is of course a risk in case of accidents. But I have never been in such a good health state.
I’m on the same journey. Food as medicine. Papaya leaf juice also helps with common colds. 🙂
It’s really great to see this blog, wish to share that it really works. Writing on this as author expressed doubt about it’s benefit to other’s, as every human has different body type.
Would like to share about dengue was detected to my son on 18 Jun 2016, after his fever of only 102-101 degree, for 3-4 days but our family doctor was expressing his doubt about dengue so went for test and it shows platelets 123000 in first test and pcv 41. Doctor suggested to repeat the test next day to see if count decrease is too much every day. But next day it was 120000 platelets and 40 pcv,
Doctor suggested not to worry but will have to be very careful for next 48 hours till virus effect is over and his body starts gaining platelets, suggested all fluids and kiwi fruits, and complete bed rest, 7 year boy was difficult to manage as he was always full of energy, always appreciated from his school teacher for his work and was leader in his class for all sort of activities.
In past heard from many people friends and online social media posts about this papaya leaf juice treatment for dengue and such sort of fevers also getting cure but was bit conscious to do experiment on my own child. But after looking at him for 3-4 days getting weak and more weak every day decided to try.
And we were successful to give him 2 doges of papaya leaf juice with honey, it was raw juice not boiled. He drank some how but in evening he wasn’t able to take any eatables or fluid. Decided not to disturb him because he had enough fluid in day and also had eaten some home made food.
Morning we again tried to give him some papaya leaf juice but was without water so his stomach was unable to take and thrown out. We decided to reach our family doctor and she is child specialist also. She understood some functioning of his lever is not responding well so given some acid controlling medicines miled one and it worked but suggested to check PCV and platelets.
We tested and his platelets were 238000, it made us so happy and we’re shocked from the response of papaya leaf juice. It was only 15ml we were able to give him only 2 times yesterday and it has increase his platelets to double and PCV increased to 43.
My god never seen such miracle but may be his platelets were not too much down is the reason am concluding for this miracle but will defiantly help some one who is about to die due to such nonsense platelet decreasing virus.
I was doing further studies to adopt this for other problems and author helped me to get another use case of cold and flu and am going to try this whenever I will reach to any flue infection in future.
Thanks alot mate. 🙂
Thank you so much for sharing your story! I’m glad that your son is doing better. Let us know how the papaya juice works for your cold.
Hi Erin, I came across your post while searching for benefits of Papaya leaf juice. My Dad, 70+yrs had a very bad fever Oct 2015, some symptoms you explained of unable to get up etc and though the fever is gone his joints still hurt which was not prior to the fever, also feels tired sooner than earlier. He did take papaya leaf juice during the fever but stopped later as the fever went away. I’ve recommended him to go for a 1 week cycle again on Papaya leaf juice to see if it benefits his joint and fatigue, did you come across sever pain and fatigue post fever and do you know if Papaya leaf juice helps ease joint pain and fatigue post fever. Would like to hear any experience you may have came across , and any other natural alternative to help resolve.
Regards,
Amit
Hi Amit,
I’m not a doctor so I can only talk about my experience. I’ve taken the papaya leaf juice at other times to help with colds. It seemed to help in that I didn’t get any sicker and bounced back. When I actually had Dengue the joint pain lasted longer than the fever, but not a year longer. The papaya leaf juice at the time helped with the pain, too.
Was your father tested for Chikungunya? I read that it can cause joint pain for a long time after the initial illness.
Sure Erin, thank you!
Are papaya leaves toxic ??? If yes what toxicity they produce ????
uhhh no, quite the opposite. Read the article 🙂