you think.
I came down with severe neck pain and headaches a few weeks ago, and although my brother indicated that could be a symptom of WNV, I dismissed it as a strained neck etc. However, when I went to my doctor last Friday, and had my weekly allergy injection, I had a strong allergic reaction where the shots (one in each arm) were given. It was the same matainence dose as the the week before so that was perculiar. Questions were asked (yes, I've been bitten by mosquitos on the property and found a dead bird in one of the ponds, while the neigbor found three dead birds),so it seems possible I may have contracted WNV compromising my immune system which caused the reaction. I won't know for sure until the blood test comes back in 3 weeks. LOL someone could be dead by then!
Anyway, I'm not too concerned now, as I apparently am young enough (44)to fight it off and I feel a lot better. But I'd like to tell all out there to use mosquito repellent and cover your skin. If you're a child or 55 or over you really need to be careful. It's no joke.
On another slant this got me thinking. Not the paranoid type, and rarely believe in conspiricies, but wouldn't this be an easy way for terriorists to contaminate the country with a virus? Start it in moquitos and let the mosquitos spread it around. Heck I saw on the news today that that two cases of malaria were found in Virginia. I though that was unheard of in the states. And WNV comes from the Middle East, with the first cases in New York City which as we all know had been targeted before. If anything it sounds like the makings of a a good fiction book.
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i caught west nile at my freinds farm from a infected bunch of mosquitos the systems are like flu stomach ache HIGH fever and soarthroat if you feel sick at all get checked out
from my expierience so far IT ANT FUN!!11
Our county health officials are monitoring my neighbors farm that has tire piles, a manure pit, and standing water. Last week they obtained a positive test, the first in the county, in a mosquito and released information only stating which township the discovery was made. I called our Emergency Services Department responsible for the testing, our Board of Health, my State Representative, our township office and the newspaper that ran the press release to find out where in the township. Guess what? They would not tell me! They don't release that kind of information. Not until I found out on my own that it was in fact at my neighbors and that I am also a horse owner would they confirm may suspicions 24 hours later.
Horse owners, West Nile Virus is fatal to 38% of the horses not vaccinated for the virus. My horse is less than 1/8 of a mile downwind from the discovery! Neither officials nor my neighbor brought any of this to my attention or anyone else in the immediate area and I am friends, or was, not sure yet, with the farmer. I heard he wanted to keep the discovery secret. This information is not being properly communicated to the public, horse clubs, veterinarians and others with legitimate concerns. Talk about getting angry!
I know this is a taxidermy site and I'm involved in taxidermy. I simply believe if any of you are horse owners or have elderly friends/relatives you really need to look out for yourselves and not blindly trust the people responsible for the monitoring programs.
Thank you for allowing me to bring this to your attention.
The liberal communist go with the flow crap has to stop!
iT PROBABLY IS TERRORISM (oops)it comes from, the Asian tiger stiped mosquito and where did tose come from?
The big boys in goverment know how to spend our money but they don't think out of the box or protect us.
It's time for kick butt people to run things
a news report last month claimed over 200 horses in the Amish communities of
southern Indiana diagnosed with West Nile. Horses were destroyed.
The only case reported so far in this county was about two weeks ago. A dead
bird had been found and turned in that tested positive. Same property
that I have been photographing water fowl on.
I turned in a band number from one of the birds I had photographed to USGS.
The bird had been banded in Ontario, Canada. My personal opinion is that migratory
birds will probably be found as the culprits of spread from area to area.
John Doe, as far as I am concerned, this is a taxidermist's potential problem.
Taxidermists are all so out door oriented, and more likely to be exposed, and as
you I also have horses as a number that come on to this site do. There are also
many bird keepers that come into this site. You will notice none of us have been
stifled in getting our messages out. Maybe we should at this time once again
thank Ken Edwards and WASCO.
This past week several horses in Southeast Pennsylvania, Bucks and Montgomery counties, tested positive for WNV.
When the WNV first hit Delaware (and I know South Carolina), all equine vets were ordering batches of the vaccine. It's a damned shame that horses have a vaccine and people DON'T. Looks like the bunny huggers are plotting to kill us all off with WNV or CWD or flatulence, or something. Where are the conspiracy theorists when your paranoia needs them? If you go outdoors, WEAR AN INSECT REPELLANT, and don't wear bright clothes. WNV mosquitoes are no different from malaria mosquitoes or just ordinary PITA (thats pain in the asp if you didn't guess) mosquitoes. DEET will keep them a away and RAID will kill them.
The West Nile Virus has been known to the medical community for decades. If it is so terrible, why do all African Nations have an overpopulation problem? It is no worse than the common influenza viral strains. The most serious impact is on North American corvids which have no immunity to the virus.
The medical community has paid a lot of attention to it and does not consider it a serious threat. Unfortunately, that is not easy to sell to the very young who have incomplete immunity systems and to the elderly and those with weakened immune apparatus.
And, by the way, one doesn't go about introducing a virus of this nature via infected mosquitos. The mosquito is a poor vector since it's life span is so short that odds are it wouldn't make the trip across the ocean. Better, much better, to release infected mammals like dogs and cats and let them swim to shore to be bitten by local mosquitos.
The only thing that bothers me about the West Nile Virus is that it popped up in New York and Israel at the same time.....that is a strange coincidence. Even with that fact in the data base, it would be a stupid terrorist who chose such a weak sister to wipe out America.
The only nagging fear that keeps me researching this viral form and it's zoopathic course, is that I want to be sure that it isn't a set-up infection sent to create a model that may be used to spread something much worse in the future. An experiment, as it may have been, to test the time required to spread much more serious viral forms via similar vectors. Now, that thought should keep you up nights!
The mosquito may be a poor vector but in junction with migratory birds it seems to have been pretty effective at inoculating most of North America in a very short time. Not all mosquitos die in winter either.
I predict this will be devastating to our blood supply and organ recipients who have a compromised immune response. It may not kill alot of people but it is another expense to our economy.
Having taken a college course in mirobiology, I noticed you didn't address the possibility of mutation of which viruses are very good at. The age of victims with severe reactions has come down by 10 years which has puzzled researchers.
I'm not alarmed yet, but with those who wish to do us harm, and how easily and quickly things move these days, you brought up some good points. It's amazing how fast the pandemic of World War I spread without the fast transport we have today. It also effected most the young and healthy and killed more troops than the war itself.
The pandemic of 1918 killed may have killed more people in India than soldiers World War I. I found this on the internet and thought it would be worth reading. I'm sorry but I forgot to credit the source.
"In the spring of 1918 large numbers of soldiers in the trenches in France became ill. The soldiers complained of a sore throat, headaches and a loss of appetite. Although it appeared to be highly infectious, recovery was rapid and doctors gave it the name of 'three-day fever'. At first doctors were unable to identify the illness but eventually they decided it was a new strain of influenza. The soldiers gave it the name Spanish Flu but there is no evidence that it really did originate from that country. In fact, in Spain they called it French Flu. Others claimed that the disease started in the Middle Eastern battlefields, whereas others blamed it on China and India. A recent study argued that the disease was brought to the Western Front by a group of USA soldiers from Kansas.
For the next few months soldiers continued to be infected with the virus but there were very few fatalities. However, in the summer of 1918, symptoms became much more severe. About a fifth of the victims developed bronchial pneumonia or septicemic blood poisoning. A large percentage of these men died. Others developed heliotrope cyanosis. Doctors were able to identify this by the bluish condition of the sufferer. Over 95% of those with heliotrope cyanosis died within a few days. This second-wave of the epidemic spread quickly. In one sector of the Western Front over 70,000 American troops were hospitalised and nearly one third of these men died failed to recover.
By the end of the summer the virus had reached the German Army. The virus created serious problems for the German military leadership as they found it impossible to replace their sick and dying soldiers. The infection had already reached Germany and over 400,000 civilians died of the disease in 1918.
The first cases of the influenza epidemic in Britain appeared in Glasgow in May, 1918. It soon spread to other towns and cities and during the next few months the virus killed 228,000 people in Britain. This was the highest mortality rate for any epidemic since the outbreak of cholera in 1849.
In Britain desperate methods were used to prevent the spread of the disease. Streets were sprayed with chemicals and people started wearing anti-germ masks. Some factories changed their no-smoking rules under the mistaken impression that tobacco fumes could kill the virus. Others believed that eating plenty of porridge would protect you from this killer disease. However, despite valiant attempts, all treatments devised to cope with this new strain of influenza were completely ineffectual.
The USA was also very badly affected by the virus. By September a particularly virulent strain began to sweep through the country. By early December about 450,000 Americans had died of the disease.
The country that suffered most was India. The first cases appeared in Bombay in June 1918. The following month deaths were being reported in Karachi and Madras. With large numbers of India's doctors serving with the British Army the country was unable to cope with the epidemic. Some historians claim that between June 1918 and July 1919 over 16,000,000 people in India died of the virus.
It has been estimated that throughout the world over 70 million people died of the influenza pandemic. In India alone, more people died of influenza than were killed all over the world during the entire First World War."
The vector carriers are the birds, in this case, as well as intermediate host mammals. Think of the birds as the aircraft carriers and the mosquitos as the short range fighter jets which depend on the mother carrier to host them.
The influenze virus epidemics (there have been more than one) caused considerable casualties in the US and in the trenches of WWI. It has been stated that up to half the soldiers on some troop ships bound for Europe died of the virus before they ever set foot on land, much less saw battle. It has been postulated that the virus ended the war, in fact.
Actually, Cecil many virals do have the ability to mutate, however many do not. One viral which is constantly changing it's proterin jacket is that which causes AIDS. The WNV has so far not shown that tendency, thank goodness, but there may be a slim chance that it can.
The specific influenza viral strain that caused the great epidemic during the early 20th century was not identified. There is a current effort to isolate the organism from preserved tissue kept by the AFIP and a few other facilities that also had kept wet specimen samples. No one knows from whence it came, nor where it went. There is a nagging fear of re-emergence of that particular strain for which we have neither immunity nor preventative innoculation available. The great influenze virus spread across the US like lightning. Since it was an airborne contractor, it spread much faster than has the West Nile which is sera introduced.
As vectors for a host species introduced virus, birds would be a wiser choice than mammals for some diseases. Infected birds could be introduced from a ship offshore much more conviently than could mammals. Birds can travel much greater distances to find land than can a swimming mammal. Since many bird species seem to be tolerant of the virus, they would seem to be ideal carriers, especially for encephalitis causing viral agents.
I should think though that were a terrorist organization or enemy country were to choose an organism for a speculative test of infection rate and geographic coverage, it would be a waste of time since the dynamics of the last influenza epidemic are well documented and studied by every medical student. The contagion demographics are simple, and a model would be easy to construct on a desktop computer, without actually introducing the organism. I would rather think that the reactive ability and the time for reaction and development of an antidote or innoculate to provide immunization would be much more interesting than would the speed and course of distribution.
Were this biologist to devise such a dastardly scheme, I would want to know how quickly a nation could react to deadly viral force and what impact the agent would have prior to confinement and development of prophylactic countermeasures........now THAT would be valuable data that could not be discerned without an actual dispersal tests.
There is also the remote possibility that the virus is a preliminary device which sets up the immunity system for another zoopathogen that would take advantage of the antibodies developed by the milder form.....Sort of a cowpox/smallpox model in the reverse. I should imagine that the mild effect of the West Nile Virus on the preponderence of infected humans results in many cases not being reported since the symptoms do not warrant medical attention. If that is the case, the numbers of infected citizens may be much higher than reporting would indicate.
Our modern world of SST's, mass human migration and recreational travel, diseases can circumvent the globe in days, if not hours. Ma Nature can facilitate disease spread quickly, but never as fast as can our modern jetliners. Let us not forget the person who contracts the disease in New York and then flies that day to California, delivering the virus to a mosquito population that resides three thousand miles from the New York marshes.......
One thing about this episode that thinking alone will not provide an answer to my question is that while the WNV is a recently recorded problem, why has it spread so much more rapidly than has the Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis which was found in the Southwest a couple of decades ago? Same vectors, but much slower to spread......that is a question I would like to seem answered. A comparative study, if you will, to determine why one form would transit the nation much quicker than would another.
When any historical exerpt is taken from before 1950, you can bet the results are catastrophic. How about the influenza that kill hundreds of thousands of people in this country in the early 1900's that went (and still does to some degree) unreported. Building the Panama Canal also claimed thousands of lives to mosquito born diseases.
The entire state of Delaware is 120 miles long and about 30 miles wide at its largest (10 at its smallest). Would you believe that more people have been killed on highways in this "state" THIS YEAR that have been claimed by West Nile Virus in America? Drunk drivers accounted for about 50% MORE fatalaties than West Nile. Where is uproar about highway speeds or drunken driving.
It seems that suddenly, Americans need a tragedy to keep their emotions stirred up. Nearly evey American can tell you, within a few hundred, how many people died in the WTC, but I challenge you to name ONE who will tell you how many died in Washington D.C. at the Pentagon. There are thousands upon thousands of maladies and blights awaiting to engulf North America and thanks to the "globalization" and "world community", it's inevitable. Oscars being caught in Floridian waters, snakehead fish being caught in Maryland, and zebra mussels in the Great Lakes. If your grocery doesn't carry kiwi fruit, mangos,Brazil nuts, pistachios, avacados,or that America nutrient requirement, bananas, who's the first one to complain to the manager? We just need to get over it.
Everyone says "someone" needs to do something, but that's a pipe dream. Did you see that the environmental protestors who attended the World Economic Summit had to pay an "IMPACT FEE" so they could fly in airplanes that polluted the atmosphere and for the 4WD SUV's they rented to gain access. How hypocritical can one group be. You can't PAY for that impact, if you are serious, you need to AVOID PARTICIPATION. All of us want the best technology can offer, yet as we partake in these benefits, we expect them to be produced with no environmental impact and as cheaply as possible. Well, I hate to be the one to tell you, But there's no way in Hell you're going to get there from here without some major changes that will take us back in time and technology. Most of you don't even want to consider that as an option, but it remains the only one.
Dang! That is a great idea, George! I think I will start an organization called IMPACT (Invest Money to Provide Assets for Cur's Tranquility). Your donations may not save the environment, but it will sure provide me with peace of mind. Remember, the money you donate today will not be spent on junk tomorrow! Each ten dollar donation will be recognized by molding your name into a brick used to build Cur's "Wall of Isolation" to be erected around suitable acreage to harbor suitable game and fish habitat that I can enjoy while sheltered from the rest of the world. Ask about IMPACT's secondary fund for atsmospheric filtering devices. Cohorts welcomed to the compound..........nubile young maidens only need apply.....yadda yadda...
You are 100% right, George! Were we obliged to pay to reverse our individual impact on this ole planet, we would be in a heap of doo doo! The tree hugging sob's who cry the loudest are sometimes the worst offenders where invironmental impact is concerned. And you can bet your rump that they will be the last to surrender the toys and gizmos that this polluting technology provides.
What the world REALLY needed was that conference. To have group of individuals from third-rate, poverty stricken nations, convene in a nation that is rife with industrial pollution. And to do what? To tell the rest of the world how to conduct business? If the bastards that attended that summit had solutions to their own denigrating poverty and lack of technical development, they would be doing just that, instead of trying to devise a scheme to extort entitlements from successful societies.
They demean the United States, yet their government agents and private business leaders are lined up at our embassies, begging for us to import more and more of the junk they call produce.
They all hate us, yet none can wait for the opportunity to sell us crap we don't need.......screw em.
I have the west nile virus and it ain't pretty my butt is all bumpy and my face looks like a monkeys butt I hate it so if I was you I would stay in the house and not go anywhere because it is to catch....
Thanks, Coach Brooks
Chester County High School