The West Nile Virus

The West Nile Virus

The West Nile virus has until recent years gone relatively unnoticed to most Americans due to the fact that it hasn’t been reported in the Western Hemisphere before 1999, when there were 62 cases of severe disease including seven deaths in the New York area. In 2000, there were 21 cases and two deaths were reported; in 2001, there were 66 severe cases and nine deaths. The virus has now been detected in birds, humans and/or horses in 32 U.S. states and Washington DC. As many as 200,000 Americans have been exposed to West Nile virus since 1999. The virus is common in the Middle East, parts of Africa and Eastern Europe.
In early October, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dispatched wildlife health specialists from the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., to New York to determine the magnitude of the current outbreak, the geographic distribution of the virus, and to evaluate the susceptibility of crows which had been found dead thro...