Study: W. Nile Virus Underreported:

“For every New Yorker

diagnosed with encephalitis or meningitis

from West Nile virus in the

summer of 1999, there were probably 140 milder infections that

went undetected, scientists have estimated.

The findings, which suggest that 2.6 percent of the metropolitan New

York City population was infected during that outbreak, indicate that

West Nile infections are vastly underreported.”

I actually wondered about this last summer after I came down with a mild, brief flu-like syndrome after a night that I had gotten numerous mosquito bites walking my dog in my neighborhood, which was only several blocks from the then-recent finding of several dead WNV-infected birds.

“As the mosquito season on the U.S. East Coast intensifies and the virus

threatens to spread elsewhere, health officials advised in The Lancet

medical journal that doctors should consider West Nile infection when

diagnosing unexplained summertime fever, especially if it’s

accompanied by headaches, muscle ache and joint pain.

For most people, West Nile virus causes only a flu-like sickness and

many who are exposed don’t get sick at all. It is mostly a concern for

the elderly.”

I called the public health agency monitoring for the virus and offered to have antibody titers drawn, and had a great deal of difficulty getting a return call from a knowledgable person, probably because I was seen as a crackpot (my wife scoffed at me too). But wouldn’t it be important to know, when they were continuing to state publicly that there were no known cases of human infection in the Boston area, that there in fact were? And that the nightly spraying in my neighborhood (itself not benign from a public health standpoint) was not effective? By the time a public health official returned my call, I was told it would no longer be useful to draw my blood because infection is established by comparing acute-phase and convalsecent antibody titers, and we had missed our chance to draw the former. Oh, well, chalk another one up for hypochondria…

And here’s a New York Times Magazine interview with Andrew Spielman, Harvard public health expert on mosquitoes and author of the new book Mosquito, which is somewhere on my summer reading list.

“So you have a double-edged relationship?

Yeah, absolutely. And in a philosophical sense they’re interesting. The

book has a quotation from Havelock Ellis that says something like, If you

would see all of nature gathered up at one point in all her beauty and

her deadliness and her sex, where would you find a more perfect

example than the mosquito? The mosquito is deadly; it’s dangerous. But he

also looked at them as beautiful. And I suppose there’s a sexual

connotation there — that whole thing in his eyes, apparently, translated

into an element of his science; i.e., human sexual behavior. It’s the female,

not the male, that can kill.”