The West Nile virus

Since it was introduced to the United States three years ago, the West Nile Virus has spread to 34 states (all east of the Rockies) as well as the District of Columbia. This summer, it has killed five Louisiana residents and sickened dozens more. To date, nearly 100 cases of West Nile encephalitis

Posted on Sat, Aug. 10, 2002

Hoosier West Nile case found
Wabash woman tested positive for disease
By Rebecca S. Green
The Journal Gazette

A 46-year-old Wabash County woman has tested positive for the West Nile virus, making her the first human case in Indiana, according to state and area health department officials.
According to Jane Skeans, a nurse with the Wabash County Health Department, the woman first became sick on Aug. 1 and received treatment at Parkview Whitley Hospital in Columbia City.

Potentially fatal, the West Nile virus has claimed seven lives in Louisiana this summer.

The fact that the case was discovered in northeast Indiana comes as no surprise to state health department officials.

"If we look at the national maps, and how this virus is spread across the country, northeast Indiana is kind of at the front of that wave," said Dr. Greg Wilson, state health commissioner.

So far no dead birds have tested positive for the virus in Wabash County.

But with Allen and now two other northeastern Indiana counties - DeKalb and LaGrange - having positive West Nile tests in birds, the disease would likely show up in adjacent areas, Wilson said.

On Tuesday, state health officials received a blood sample from the Wabash resident - who was hospitalized for severe headaches, muscle weakness, muscle pain and a rash.

That test confirmed the presence of the virus, which can develop into encephalitis, or severe swelling of the brain. The virus usually reveals itself with flulike symptoms.

Fortunately, the symptoms did not develop into a more serious form of the disease, Wilson said.

After blood tests revealed the presence of West Nile virus, state health officials notified the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Officials there requested the blood sample be sent to their laboratories in Fort Collins, Colo., where it tested positive again, Wilson said.

The CDC is tracking the spread of the disease nationwide, Wilson said, as well as examining the course of each case to compile statistics nationally.

More than 700 dead bird samples have been sent to the state health department, and 60 tests have come back positive for the virus, which is an increase over recent years, Wilson said.

Almost 130 human blood samples have also been tested for the virus, he said.

In other local counties, three more dead crows have been found, each testing positive for West Nile earlier this week.

Thursday afternoon, DeKalb County health officials received word that two crows found on the northwest side of Auburn tested positive for the virus. LaGrange County health officials also reported the finding of a crow that also tested positive.

"The best thing people can do is to reduce the number of mosquitoes and protect themselves when they go outside," said Mike Garrett, environmental health specialist for DeKalb County.

But DeKalb County and Auburn city officials are going to go at the problem chemically - using pesticides that attack both the larvae and adult mosquitoes.

Auburn Mayor Norman Yoder said city officials have been anticipating the arrival of the virus - which is passed from birds to mosquitoes, which then can pass it to humans.

"We've been talking about this for the past month, and what to do if we (had a positive West Nile test)," Yoder said.

While state health department officials have recommended Auburn officials spray just a one-mile radius around the spot where the dead birds were found - north of Indiana 8, near Interstate 69, Yoder said the entire city will be sprayed.

The first dead crow was reported by a nearby resident, Garrett said, with the second being reported by an Auburn police officer.

If more birds are found over the weekend, Garrett said individuals should freeze the birds until Monday and contact the health department, which will send them to the Indiana Department of Health for evaluation.

No birds within a 5-mile radius of the two previously discovered crows will be accepted, Garrett said, because the state lab has been so inundated by birds requested to be tested, they are fast becoming overwhelmed.

LaGrange County Health Department officials declined to reveal the location where the dead bird was discovered or whether they will spray for the mosquitoes.

DeKalb County officials will use a larvicide called Vectolex - a bacterial agent that kills mosquito larvae, Garrett said. Because it is bacterial in nature, it is not harmful to humans or other animals.

"I think it's more effective to hit the larvae before they hatch," Garrett said. "We know they're there. In the long term, you have to get rid of where they are coming from."

Auburn City officials will be using Anvil - a pesticide already in use in Allen County to combat mosquitoes.

"We've looked at several (pesticides)," Yoder said. "This is probably the safest, but accomplishes the goal with the mosquitoes."

State and local health department officials urge residents to eliminate all potential mosquito breeding grounds in their yards and neighborhoods - cleaning out gutters, changing the water in bird baths and shallow pools at least once a week, and emptying buckets or other containers.

"The mosquitoes don't travel that far," Wilson said. "That's the reason for neighbors to get together and clean up. They are their own best defense."

When going outside, people should also wear protective clothing, such as long-sleeve shirts and pants, as well as a mosquito repellent containing DEET.

(From the BBC news site)

Saturday, 10 August, 2002, 05:14 GMT 06:14 UK

US virus claims more lives

The worst outbreak of West Nile virus in US history has killed two more people - bringing the death toll to seven so far.

The latest victims were women from Louisiana, where the other five deaths occurred.

About 110 others have been infected - most than half of them in the past week - in five states and Washington DC.

Spraying has been intensified to prevent the spread of the mosquito-borne virus, and officials plan to hand out insect repellent.

West Nile virus was first identified in the United States in 1999, when 60 people were infected, and seven died in the initial outbreak.

The disease can produce flu-like symptoms; complications can include swelling of the brain which may lead to paralysis, brain damage, or death.

The virus originates in birds, but is passed on to mosquitoes which feed on animals and humans.

Spreading

While healthy people may suffer only flu symptoms, the disease can prove fatal for the elderly or those with weak immune systems.

An outbreak in New York in 2000 killed seven people

Louisiana Governor Mike Foster has declared a state-wide emergency.

A special team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, has been sent to the state to deal with the outbreak.

Other states currently affected include Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Illinois, and Washington DC.

Since its first appearance, the disease has been detected in 35 US states.

There are fears the virus, which has never been found further west than Houston, Texas, may spread across the entire country.

West Nile virus is believed to have been brought to the US by travellers returning from Africa.

One would have to conclude, given the facts, that environmentalists are either insane or intent upon eradicating every human being from the face of the planet.
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring: Environmentalist Mythology Killing Us Softly
By Steven Brockerman (August 11, 2002)

[CAPITALISMMAGAZINE.COM] Theirs is the disease you don’t hear about on the nightly news. Newspaper editorialists, too, are silent about the death toll from this ailment – nearly 9 ½ million people since 1999, of which 8½ million were pregnant women or children under the age of five. No, the disease isn’t AIDS. It’s mosquito borne malaria, and we’ve had the means for wiping out this affliction for over a century. However, thanks to environmentalist mythology, the tool, DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), has been banned in most countries worldwide.

The ban on DDT, like the modern environmentalist movement itself, grew out of the book, Silent Spring, by Rachael Carson. As almost any school child today can parrot, Carson claimed DDT thinned the eggs of birds. Pointing to a 1956 study by Dr. James DeWitt published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, Carson wrote: "Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments [demonstrate] that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction."

DeWitt, however, concluded no such thing. Indeed, he discovered in his study that 50% more eggs hatched from DDT fed quail than from those in the control group.

Following Carson’s lead, hippie environmentalists began claiming that raptor populations – eagles, osprey, hawks, etc. – were declining due to DDT. They failed to note that such populations had been declining precipitously for years prior to the use of DDT. Indeed, according to the yearly Audubon Christmas Bird Counts, 1941 to 1960, years that saw the greatest, most widespread use of DDT, the count of eagles actually increased from 197 in 1941 to 897 in 1960. A forty-year count over roughly the same period by the Hawks Mountain Sanctuary Association also found population increases for Ospreys and most kinds of hawks.

Finally, after years of study, researchers at Cornell University "found no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds where ‘catastrophic’ decreases in shell quality and reproduction have been claimed" ("Effects of PCBs, DDT, and mercury compounds upon egg production, hatchability and shell quality in chickens and Japanese quail").

Carson, her book’s affected prose designed to create optimum public panic, heralded, too, a coming cancer epidemic among humans. Her assertion was based on the high incidences of liver cancer found in adult rainbow trout in 1961 – a result, not of DDT, but of a fungi produced carcinogen, aflatoxin.

Once again, environmentalists followed Carson’s lead. A 1969 study ("Multigeneration studies on DDT in mice.") concluded that mice fed DDT developed a higher incidence of leukemia and liver tumors than unexposed mice. Epidemiology data of the preceding 25 years, though, showed no increases in liver cancer among the human populations in the areas where DDT had been sprayed. Upon further examination of the data, moreover, researchers discovered high incidences of tumors in the control group, too. Apparently, both groups had been feed food that was moldy, contaminated by aflatoxin.

Since then, in 1978, after a two-year study, the National Cancer Institute has concluded that, indeed, DDT is not carcinogenic. Even more recently, a study ("Plasma organochlorines levels and the risk of breast cancer") published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October 1997 found nothing to indicate that the risk of breast cancer is increased by exposure to DDT or DDE (a byproduct of DDT).

None of this evidence, though, would have swayed William Ruckelshaus, head of a brand new Environmental Protection Agency in 1971. Ruckelshaus not only refused to attend EPA’s 1971-72 administrative hearings on DDT, but also refused to read even one page of the 9,000 pages of testimony. Not surprisingly, Ruckelshaus ignored the findings of the hearings’ judge – ""DDT is not a carcinogenic … a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man – and banned DDT anyway. It’s not surprising because William Ruckelshaus was a member of the Environmental Defense Fund – later his personal stationery would have printed on it the following boast: "EDF's scientists blew the whistle on DDT by showing it to be a cancer hazard, and three years later, when the dust had cleared, EDF had won."

Since 1971, pressured by specialized environmentalist organizations like the International Pesticide Action Network, much of the rest of the world has banned DDT, too. Those countries now rely on pesticides that are neither as effective nor as safe as DDT. Meanwhile, the death tolls from malaria in tropical Third World countries silently climbs. Heedless of this, environmentalists are now pressuring governments to preserve wetlands, i.e., swamps, which are the foremost breeding grounds of disease carrying mosquitoes. One would have to conclude, given the facts, that environmentalists are either insane or intent upon eradicating every human being from the face of the planet. At a UN sponsored earth summit in 1971, a delegate’s remark gives us the answer: "What this world needs is a good plague to wipe out the human population."

If the death toll from malaria begins to mount in this country, we’ll certainly hear about it on the nightly news. Malaria will be blamed, of course, but the real culprit will be environmentalist mythology, which has been killing us softly for decades.

--Steven Brockerman is an assistant editor for Capitalism Magazine, www.capitalismmagazine.com

(rintense, take some tomatoes with you to the concert.)

Going Camping? Pack a Tomato

By Hannah Hoag

Next summer, campers and picnickers may be turning to a tomato extract to keep the mosquitoes from biting.

Michael Roe, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, was designing synthetic insecticides when he realized their structures resembled that of an oily organic compound that occurs naturally in tomatoes. "I thought I would test the substance as an insect repellent--on a whim, basically," he says. Roe grabbed a cloth, dabbed it with a synthetic version of the tomato molecule, and placed it in a cage full of cockroaches. They scattered. He then did additional tests to show that the molecule repelled mosquitoes and ticks as well.

Alan Brandt, president and chief operating officer of Insect Biotechnology Inc., a Durham, North Carolina, company that develops and markets insecticides, caught wind of this discovery while he was working with Roe on several other projects. He decided to compare the tomato compound to DEET, the most popular and effective commercial bug repellent. Each year approximately one-third of Americans spray or spread DEET-based insect repellents on their skin to keep bugs at bay.

A 20 percent solution of the tomato extract, applied to the arms of volunteers, repelled mosquitoes as effectively as the same concentration of DEET. But during a 12-hour test, DEET's efficacy slipped, letting 4 out of every 100 mosquitoes take a nibble. Arms covered with the tomato-derived compound stayed bite-free. DEET also has been linked to adverse reactions, including irritated skin, rashes, and blisters. The Environmental Protection Agency considers DEET to be safe when used correctly, but many parents worry about exposing their children to the chemical. "People are looking for an alternative," says Brandt.

For proprietary reasons, Insect Biotechnology will not reveal the name of the insect-repelling molecule. The company calls it IBI-246; IBI stands for the company's name. Brandt says that while the compound is well known and used in other products, he will not identify it until after a patent for its use as a repellent has been granted. Even to those in the know, IBI-246 is somewhat mysterious: Neither Roe nor Brandt understands exactly how it deters mosquitoes from their blood quest. Brandt suspects that, like DEET, the compound disrupts a chemical receptor on the mosquito's antennae that the insect uses to guide itself to its prey. Tomatoes probably create this molecule as part of the plant's natural anti-insect arsenal, Roe says.

Because the tomato-derived substance is a naturally occurring compound that is already used in other products, including cosmetics, it is known to be safe and unlikely to produce any adverse skin reactions. Brandt expects to have the tomato-inspired bug repellent on the market by the time the mosquitoes start biting in 2003.

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