"The chances of being infected are very, very minimal….It's certainly
nothing to be alarmed about." But there appears to be an increasing number of infections in children, and West Nile virus strains are now attacking younger adults — such as a fifty-three-year-old otherwise healthy man. However, even if the scourge preyed only upon senior citizens, that still amounts to some thirty-two million men and women, one out of every eight Americans. And they aren't just numbers — they are people's parents, children's grandparents, and America's "Greatest Generation." They are people like seventy-two-year-old Ernest Hunt from Louisiana, who succumbed three weeks after being bit by a mosquito while he and his wife, Becky, were enjoying a lakefront Fourth of July barbecue with family and friends. It is now a risk for people to tend to their gardens and take evening walks during the summer months, because the West Nile virus is lurking— everywhere.
By Labor Day 2003, over 5,000 human infections had been reported, and 95 deaths. The CDC predicted another 100 people would die by the end of the year. It is now estimated that since the initial August 1999 outbreak, 200,000 people have been exposed to the West Nile virus. The death toll is approaching 400 and rising. There is no known cure or human vaccine.
West Nile virus struck New York City in August 1999 because of an increase in international trade and travel, the scientists say. The same scientists who chalk up Lyme disease to changes in human land-use patterns say that West Nile virus came to the United States in the passenger cabin of a commercial airliner. One doctor lays out a scenario whereby mosquitoes board an 1998 El Al flight from Israel (where scientists say a similar strain existed in 1998) and bite passengers on board. After landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport in southern Queens, New York, some of the bitten passengers go home to the Flushing area in northern Queens, where they are bitten again by domestic mosquitoes, which then carry off the virus and lay eggs. Mosquitoes hitch a ride from the airport to Flushing, goes the theory. The marshy inlets of the Long Island Sound provide an optimal breeding area, and female mosquitoes pass along the virus to millions of their offspring for the 1999 mosquito season. This scenario is certainly plausible, but it is far from proven — and there is no scientific support to back it up. "Unless there's a molecular signature," notes one scientist, "you can't tell how it came in — you just can't."
Though a few researchers rule out the possibility that the West Nile virus outbreak was a bioterrorism attack waged by an unknown enemy, most likely Iraq, others aren't so sure. "Of course it could have been easily intentionally introduced," says one scientist familiar with bioterrorism. "Saddam Hussein had worked on it and threatened us with it. All someone had to do was come into JFK Airport with a inconspicuously small bottle of twenty or so infected mosquitoes, and go to the Bronx Zoo or to Flushing Bay and let them loose." The scientist rejects the conventional airplane theory because he says not one of the infected persons in 1999 was an airline passenger arriving from a foreign country.
Other than hypotheticals like these, the scientific community is at a loss to identify the origin of the 1999 West Nile virus outbreak.
For all their postulating, none of the seasoned virus hunters looked to New York-area germ laboratories. A spokesperson for the New York Department of Health said frankly, "It has not been on the top of our to-do list." The director of the CDC, James Hughes, said as interesting as the question of how was to entertain, "the answer may remain elusive— Mother Nature does not always reveal her secrets." But was it Mother Nature's secret to keep?
The West Nile outbreak brings to light the kinship between animal and human virus diseases. It illustrates how zoonotic viruses like West Nile fever, Rift Valley fever, Ebola fever, anthrax, and influenza move easily between animals and humans to achieve devastating results. For example, horses, like humans, are particularly susceptible to West Nile fever virus. What the public doesn't know is that at the same exact time that humans in Queens were dying, dead horses were being quietly carted off Long Island farms to Plum Island. Where the El Al commercial jet scenario falls short is where the plight of the horses begins.
While Dr. McNamara tended to her Bronx Zoo bird flock and Dr. Asnis cared for her Queens patients, horse farm owners seventy-five miles east were placing frantic phone calls to Dr. John Andresen at the Mattituck-Laurel Veterinary Hospital. Owners of thirteen North Fork farms on the east end of Long Island phoned and each call sounded the same: their cherished horses were losing all sense of motor coordination. The horses' hindlegs were buckling, and they were stumbling, neighing, twitching, and convulsing. "It was a mystery," recalled Andresen, who normally received four horse-related phone calls in a year — not thirteen in a week. Going out to investigate, he found "neurological cases, which are uncommon in an equine practice." One horse had collapsed in the stable, thrashing, unable to right himself on his legs. "It was in bad shape," Dr. Andresen recalled. The poor stallion expired before Andresen could give its owner his prognosis. Alarmed by the rife similarities, he contacted New York State's head veterinarian, Dr. John Huntley, who in turn called in the USDA's emergency response team. It wasn't the first time this virus SWAT team had descended upon Long Island's North Fork; an earlier team spearheaded an investigation into a 1978 virus outbreak on Plum Island.
By August 26—just three days after Dr. Asnis phoned in her alert to the New York City Health Department — a strange disease was confirmed in eighteen cases on thirteen horse farms, all in the North Fork hamlets of Riverhead, Jamesport, and Mattituck. Ten horses died, either on their own or by lethal injection to ease their misery. Expert epidemiologists flew in from Kentucky, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and met with Dr. Andresen to get the lay of the land. The team collected samples from 146 horses in the area and found that an alarming 25 percent of them tested positive for West Nile virus. Each farm visited had large pools of standing water in watering areas, ripe for mosquito transmission.
All of the infections occurred in a five-mile radius. The epicenter of these mysterious horse deaths was less than twenty miles away from a faulty exotic virus disease laboratory.
Of all the counties polled in the New York City metropolitan area in 1999, Suffolk County's dead bird and infected mosquito counts were among the highest recorded. The story of the horses raises even greater suspicions. Infection records from the last few years indicate how West Nile virus spread. In 2000, there were 60 cases and 20 deaths in seven states. In 2001, 738 confirmed cases and 156 deaths occurred in 20 states. In the outbreak year, 1999, records charted all equines in New York, Connecticut, and Maryland (the range of the West Nile virus outbreak by the end of its first year) into account — horses, ponies, mules, burros, and donkeys. Strikingly, none of the 271,000 equines tested positive for the West Nile virus, with one exception — Long Island's North Fork.[12] The simultaneous equine outbreak of this zoonotic virus, with the human outbreak occurring over seventy-five miles away, reveals that the ground zero of the West Nile virus outbreak was the North Fork peninsula opposite Plum Island, not JFK International Airport in New York City.
Many of the stable owners bred and sold horses to make a living, so they were glad to keep the exotic virus infections in their stables a secret. As the emergency team finished its work that August, the USDA quietly gathered the horse carcasses from the stables. From the eighteen horses, they gathered pints of blood, spinal tap fluid, even whole brain hemispheres, and carefully whisked them to the Plum Island ferry. On Plum Island, a pathologist performed a necropsy (animal autopsy) on the carcasses, and the brain tissues were sliced up and examined under the microscope. Clinical signs were recorded; samples apportioned, sealed, labeled, and refrigerated; and the horse remains went down the chute to the incinerator charging room.
12
Two horses that tested positive for West Nile virus were stabled at Belmont Park racetrack in Nassau County, Long Island, west of the North Fork, which lies in Suffolk County. These horses were purportedly shipped from Suffolk.