Study Links Risks of Virus to Seasons
Posted on: Monday, 6 March 2006, 15:01 CST
By Lee Bowman SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
Human risk of contracting West Nile virus surges in late summer and fall in the United States because that's when mosquitoes carrying the virus increasingly bite people rather than birds, researchers reported.
Since it was introduced into the United States in 1999, the virus has became the most widespread mosquito-borne disease in the country, spreading to the 48 contiguous states and infecting as many as 1 million people as of last summer.
Fortunately, most people don't get severe symptoms with the virus, but about 20,000 come down with flulike illness, and a smaller number have sustained nerve damage and other severe effects. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that about 700 people have died from the virus in this country since 1999.
The virus is transmitted by mosquitoes in the Culex family and usually cycles between birds that the mosquitoes feed on. But the new study, published online by the open-access journal Public Library of Science Biology, suggests that the major carrier of the virus in the United States, Culex pipiens, changes its feeding habits from their preferred hosts, American robins, over to American humans in the late summer and fall as the robins head south.
The researchers were led by Marm Kilpatrick, a senior research scientist with the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York.
Their findings from 2005 showed that from May to June, the American robin, while accounting for just 4.5 percent of the bird population at the test sites, provided 51 percent of the Culex pipiens' meals.
But as the summer wore on, the robins dispersed from their breeding grounds. And even though the overall number of birds in the test areas continued to rise as new broods hatched, the mosquitoes that carry West Nile passed on starlings and sparrows and turned to people. By August, the probability that a mosquito's last meal came from a human had increased sevenfold.
Source: Albuquerque Journal
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