From the 59 patients included, 39 were classified as severe dengue and 20 as mild dengue. Detailed demographic, clinical, and laboratorial data from dengue patients are summarized in Table 1 . Blood collection was performed between 3 and 10 days after disease onset. In order to avoid effects due to differences in the blood collection time, we compared mild and severe dengue patient groups using Mann-Whitney U Test, which showed no differences in the disease onset time at the moment of sample collection [see Additional file 1]. The original data used to perform this analysis is shown at Figure 1 .