A painful mosquito-born virus spreading quickly through the Caribbean is causing alarm in Haiti and neighboring Dominican Republic, where health officials are scrambling to respond to a surge of new patients.

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

Since then, it has jumped from island to island, sending thousands of patients to the hospital with painful joints, pounding headaches and spiking fevers.

"You feel it in your bones, your fingers and your hands. It's like everything is coming apart," 34-year-old Sahira Francisco told the Associated Press as she and her daughter waited for treatment at a hospital in San Cristobal, a town in the southern Dominican Republic that has seen a surge of the cases in recent days.

Chikungunya is a virus more commonly found in Africa and Asia and transmitted by the same daytime-biting aedes aegypti mosquito that causes the more deadly dengue fever.

"These mosquitoes know no borders," Phyllis Kozarsky, a physician with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta told Reuters.

Seven deaths have been associated with the virus, but those people likely suffered from other health problems, health officials say. Chikungunya, while extremely debilitating, is normally not deadly and symptoms begin to dissipate within a week.