Kindgo
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By Maggie Fox
Reuters
WASHINGTON (July 25) - West Nile virus has sickened 12 people in the United States -- all but one of them in Louisiana -- as it takes a permanent hold in parts of the southeast, federal health officials said on Thursday.
The twelfth case was in Mississippi, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The patients, none of whom has died, range in age from 34 to 88 and several remain in the hospital.
West Nile, which has only been in the country for three years, has also spread to three new states -- Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota, the CDC said in its weekly report on death and disease.
The virus, which made its first Western Hemisphere appearance in New York's borough of Queens in 1999, is now considered endemic along most of the U.S. East Coast, meaning it will come back every year.
West Nile is moving west and north more quickly than experts at first predicted, carried, they believe, by migrating birds and infecting birds, horses and people.
''It is going to be here to stay. We are going to have to live with it in our midst,'' said CDC epidemiologist Daniel O'Leary.
But people who are infected rarely become seriously ill, he added. ''I don't think that people need to be terribly nervous about getting the disease,'' O'Leary said.
Although it is not an especially deadly disease, West Nile is worrying because it is new to the country, experts say. It is an example of how infections can spread around the world with no warning.
It has killed 18 people since its appearance in the United States, and caused serious infections in 161, the CDC said.
At this time last year only nine states had reported West Nile infections in birds or mosquitoes, but 28 states have reported them this year.
O'Leary said Louisiana reported one human case of West Nile Virus last year. He and other experts noted that states such as Louisiana and Florida have what amounts to year-round transmission of West Nile from birds to mosquitoes now.
HARD TO PREDICT OUTBREAKS
That does not necessarily translate into a constant risk of human infection, O'Leary said. ''It's hard to predict from year to year when these are going to pop up,'' he said in a telephone interview from his office in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Mosquitoes must become infected in large numbers and then must survive long enough for the virus to build up in their bodies, and then they must bite people. ''All the factors have to be in the same place at the same time,'' O'Leary said.
''Most people who are infected with the virus either never know or experience a mild flu-like illness,'' he said.
But in some cases West Nile virus, first detected in Uganda in 1937, can cause encephalitis or meningitis, which are inflammations of the brain and spinal cord.
An estimated one in 150 infected people will develop encephalitis, O'Leary said.
The CDC did blood tests on residents of northern Queens in New York after the first U.S outbreak there. They found 2.5 percent of the local population was infected.
For every 140 infections, only one person developed encephalitis or meningitis. One in five of those infected remember having been sick with a fever. ''Four out of five didn't even know they had been infected,'' O'Leary said.
''And at that time people weren't even taking precautions.'' Now health authorities monitor the bird and mosquito populations and start mosquito control measures when the virus builds up to a certain level.
Residents are now aware, too, and people know to use repellent and to cover up with clothing when outside during mosquito season.
Reut16:07 07-25-02
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God bless,
Kindgo
Inside the will of God there is no failure. Outside the will of God there is no success.
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