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West Nile Virus Spreads Across the Nation in Face of Growing Heat & Cuts in Some Abatement Programs

Posted byHoumanitarian

(Elizabeth Weise, USA Today)
Health officials nationwide are bracing for a sharp escalation in West Nile virus cases as the disease peaks over the next six weeks. They worry that this year’s high case count could be just a taste of the future, as changing weather patterns allow the mosquitoes that carry the deadly disease to flourish.

Lyle Petersen, director of CDC’s Division of Vector-borne Infectious Diseases, said the agency has learned that “hot weather seems to promote West Nile virus outbreaks.” Those changes are coming even as budget woes are causing counties around the country to cut back on mosquito abatement. There are more than 1,100 mosquito control districts in the nation and almost all are “getting hit,” said Joe Conlon of the American Mosquito Control Association in Mount Laurel, N.J.

Killing mosquitoes that carry disease has been proven to cut down disease rates, said Edward Walker, a professor of entomology at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich. In 2002 during a bad West Nile virus year in Michigan, researchers compared counties that had mosquito control programs with those that didn’t. “If you lived outside of the mosquito control area, you had a 10-fold elevated risk of getting West Nile virus,” Walker said.

Warmer weather is only going to make abatement efforts more crucial, experts say. Since 1895, the contiguous 48 states have seen a long-term temperature increase of about 0.12 degrees per decade, according to the National Climatic Data Center. The warming has been most pronounced in the past two decades, as each of the past 15 years have been warmer-than-average. Six of the USA’s top eight warmest years on record have occurred since 1998, the climate center reports…

…The wrinkle in all this is that Texas, which has been the national hot spot for West Nile this month, hasn’t cut abatement efforts and still has the highest number of West Nile cases nationally, 640 illnesses including 23 deaths, said Christine Mann of the Texas Department of Social and Health Services.

In Texas, weather, not a lack of mosquito abatement, is driving the outbreak, said Richard Duhrkopf, a mosquito biologist at Baylor University in Waco and past president of the Texas Mosquito Control Association. While there have been cuts to surveillance, a warm winter, early spring and hot summer have been so much a factor in a surge in the mosquito population that “I honestly don’t believe that (cuts have) played a factor with respect to this outbreak,” he said.

However, he said he believes that had Texas been subject to the kinds of cuts other parts of the country has “I shudder to think what we would have seen here,” Duhrkopf said. “It could have been much, much worse.”
(Read the full story at USA Today)

IN THE SPOTLIGHT: WEST NILE IMPACTS
• West Nile Causes Kidney Disease, Houston Study Finds (Houston Chronicle)
• Widow Talks About Life With West Nile, Death (KPRC 2 News)

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