Mosquitos,
Ticks...and Fish! (cont.)
No one
knew at first that the itinerant mosquito had brought with it a disease
never before seen in the Western Hemisphere. The first victims of West
Nile virus were dozens of birds at the Bronx Zoo and thousands of crows.
By the end of September 1999, 61 people had been hospitalized, seven were
dead and as many as 1,900 were infected.
"West Nile is an emergency," says Durland Fish ’66 flatly. In testimony before the U.S. Senate, he was blunt. "The introduction of a foreign insect-borne virus, never before seen in the Western Hemisphere, is a public health threat unprecedented in modern times. It is reminiscent of the introduction of yellow fever and bubonic plague in past centuries."
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Durland Fish is one of the nation’s leading research scientists in vector-borne diseases, including two of the newest and most serious threats to public health, West Nile virus and Lyme disease. A medical entomologist and associate professor of epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University School of Medicine, he is a frequent commentator on public health risks of these diseases. "The concept of emerging diseases is nothing new," Fish says. "It is a continuous process. It has occurred throughout evolutionary history. It’s accelerated because of our shrinking world." But today, according to Fish, the threat of new infectious diseases comes as much from the lack of public health infrastructure to deal with them as from the diseases themselves. "The West Nile virus outbreak has shocked New Yorkers with the realization that a single mosquito bite can be fatal," he wrote in an editorial in The New York Times in 1999. "They may even be more shocked to know that such outbreaks are preventable." |