Thanks to advocates like Nostrum, the public has become aware of the debilitating ailment and how best to prevent it. He was the first to reject GlaxoSmithKline's much-ballyhooed LYMErix, a genetically engineered Lyme disease vaccine that was pulled off the shelves in February 2002.[11] Nostrum isn't fully cured, either — you never can be. When he's run down, fatigue and deep joint pain set in. He'll never sing and play instruments again like he did back in the 1980s, when his quartet won a third place award from the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America. When he feels up to it, he spends evenings surf casting with his son, or stargazing from the telescope on his back porch. Most of all he likes to drive his car — New York State license plate mr lyme (his wife's, mrs lyme) — over to the beach and quietly walk the rocky shore, collecting sandglass and seashells.
He watches flocks of birds fly overhead, he listens to their faint squawks high up in the sky, gliding over the expanse of the Long Island Sound, toward Connecticut — and toward the epicenter of the epidemic of the strange bacteria that has claimed the better part of his life.
And he wonders.
2
1999: East End Meets West Nile
When man domesticated certain lower animals for his personal comfort and gain, he assumed the obvious hazard of sharing their diseases.
Birds were losing their minds at the Bronx Zoo. Some flew in perpetual circles. Others died in their cages. Veterinarian in charge Dr. Tracey McNamara was concerned about the twenty-four birds— ducks, owls, a bald eagle, a black-crowned heron, and magpies— suffering in perhaps the most famous zoo in the world in August 1999.
McNamara had recently attended Plum Island's foreign animal disease school, where vets were taught how to diagnose exotic disease outbreaks and respond. But when she dialed the emergency telephone number set up to report possible foreign animal diseases, she found the line disconnected. The program was presided over by new Plum Island acting director Dr. Lee Ann Thomas, who had recently replaced director Dr. Alfonso Torres, who had replaced director Dr. Harley Moon when he left to return to Iowa in 1996, who replaced director Dr. Roger Breeze. Since Dr. Breeze's departure, there had been no continuity in the laboratory's leadership. According to sources, no one wanted the job because Breeze pulled the lab's strings from afar.
In the last few days of that August, Dr. Deborah Asnis, a specialist in infectious disease at a small Queens hospital, noticed an unusual pattern. Two and then four hospital patients, all elderly, contracted fevers with headaches, muscle weakness, and mental ailments that progressed into comas. A fifth patient came in a few days later with the same symptoms, and neighboring hospitals admitted three more strikingly similar cases. Each victim had recently spent time outdoors in the evenings, and lived near Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, a marshy mosquito breeding ground on the Long Island Sound. Testing blood samples and fluid from spinal taps, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) diagnosed the ailment as St. Louis encephalitis (SLE), a malady caused by a domestic arbovirus (a virus transmitted by airborne insects) found along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The pesky mosquito was suspected as the culprit. New York City immediately launched a massive $6 million aerial and ground pesticide campaign, spraying the pesticide malathion (a potent neurotoxin carcinogen) and distributing over 300,000 cans of DEET chemical insect repellant to city firehouses, which spawned a public fright of its own.
The determined forty-five-year-old McNamara kept calling other numbers until she reached someone, and sent her bird tissue samples to the USDA's domestic animal disease laboratory in Ames, Iowa. A trained pathologist, McNamara knew that SLE would attack the zoo's chickens; finding the chickens healthy, she suspected a different germ was sickening both her patients and Dr. Asnis's human ones. She called the CDC and told them about her freezer full of dead birds and about a possible animal-human link. A CDC scientist brushed her off, offering to send samples. "You're just dealing with some veterinary thing," he uttered with contempt. McNamara later told Madeline Drexler, author of Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections, that she felt the CDC treated her like a "dingbat, premenopausal female veterinarian in New York City." McNa-mara sent the CDC the virus samples anyway — infected tissues of a snowy owl, several rare Chilean flamingos, and a cormorant — but the agency paid them no mind.
McNamara then contacted the Army's germ labs at Fort Detrick. They requested samples be sent right away. Because of her persistence, Fort De-trick was able to determine that the germ from bird and human samples was the same virus — the "West Nile virus," a microbe never before seen in the Western Hemisphere.
The culprit spreading the virus was the same one that transmitted the Rift Valley fever virus and so many other deadly germs — the wily mosquito.
The public reacted with hysteria. Parents kept their children indoors. Television reporters blitzed viewers with neighborhood chemical spraying alerts and tips on avoiding the virus, which seemed to be affecting the elderly, young children, and those with weakened immune systems, such as patients undergoing cancer treatments. Officials in Greenwich, Connecticut, announced a 5:00 p.m. curfew on all outdoor activities. A story in The New Yorker by Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone, the best-seller about the feared Ebola virus, helped stir the pot. He revealed that an Iraqi defector (Saddam Hussein's body double) told sources that West Nile virus strains were part of Iraq's biological warfare program. Worse, the virus strain isolated by Fort Detrick was found to be similar to strains held by the Russians. "It is really an epidemic," said a doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, a few weeks after the initial diagnosis. "And this outbreak is still growing." By year's end, sixty-two people had been confirmed infected and five more died, raising the death toll to seven.
First discovered amid the swampy banks of the Nile River in Uganda in 1937, West Nile virus has increased its dominion far and wide in America, reaching forty-three states (as far west as Montana) via birds and mosquitoes. The casualties had shrunk to twenty-one infections and two deaths in 2000, but that was deceptive. Spreading with newfound fury in 2002, West Nile boasted 4,156 confirmed cases and 284 deaths in the United States. There were 329 cases in Louisiana alone, where the mosquito is half jokingly referred to as the state bird. Illinois topped all states with 884 confirmed infections and 64 deaths. An all-out chemical pesticide attack was waged from airplanes, pickup trucks, and handheld sprayers hopscotching from backyard to backyard.
News reporters interviewed doctors, who sought to play down the threat. During one recent NBC Nightly News segment, a doctor stressed that "only those over sixty are at risk." Another state health official said,
11
Though manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline generated $40 million in sales during its inaugural year, they cited poor sales when pulling it off the market. Some critics said it caused Lyme disease-like side effects such as arthritis and muscle pain, and created a false sense of security — it only reached 80 percent effectiveness after three doses were administered. It was also unsafe for children under fifteen years of age.