the West Nile virus.
B ETHESDA , M ARYLAND - With summer in a few months, some medical entomologists fear that national and local health services can fail to counter a possible resurgence of West Nile virus by mosquitoes, which caused severe inflammation of the brain in 63 people in New York and neighboring counties last year, killing seven ( science NOW, March 13). But at a press conference today, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials assured reporters that a "sound public health control plan is in place" to contain the virus .
"last fall, many of our state and local partners were not prepared," said the CDC West Nile coordinator Stephen Ostroff. Now CDC spent $ 2.7 million to help 19 counties local health and on the East coast and the Gulf of Mexico - where migratory birds are most likely to spread the virus. - set up surveillance of the virus and malaria programs the agency also developed new laboratory tests, trained laboratory personnel from state and local health services, and set up a website to facilitate communication between health workers
After the outbreak of West Nile summer latest -. The first in the Western Hemisphere - some scientists had hoped that the virus disappears during the winter, when mosquito populations decline sharply. But those hopes were recently dashed when the virus was found in a red-tailed hawk died in Westchester County, in the northern suburbs of New York, and in Culex mosquitoes wintering at Fort Totten, a historic building in the New York borough of Queens.
Yet Ostroff stressed that the chances of contracting West Nile virus are very low. An unpublished study by the CDC and the New York Department of Health found that 2.5% of more than 0 residents of the "Hot Zone" - the area in Queens, where most cases have occurred - was infected last summer. But the vast majority of infected people suffered very mild symptoms or none at all. The elderly and patients whose immune systems are impaired at the highest risk of developing the disease.
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