When West Nile first arrived in the U.S. 1999, it brought with it panic and the promise of a cure, or at least at treatment. Nearly 15 years later, West Nile still takes American lives, but a cure or a treatment, that never materialized. To be fair, West Nile affects a fairly small contingent of the population. From 2006 through 2012, there were 17,382 recorded cases. It’s a tricky disease. Incidence varies widely year to year. Most people who contract West Nile will never even know it. About 1 in 5 will show symptoms, which resemble the common cold, but there is a small percentage of individuals, about 1 percent, according to the CDC, of those who contract the disease who will develop neurological symptoms, known as the neuroinvasive version of the disease. Most patients with non-neuroinvasive West Nile recover completely, although fatigue, malaise, and weakness can linger for weeks or months. But patients who manage to recover from the acute neuroinvasive infection are often left with neurologic deficits that never go away. About 10 percent of people with the neurinvasive version die, more than 1,600 so far. My grandmother was one of those people. One part of this story is a mystery story as I chronicle the heartbreaking weeks my family and I spent with my grandmother in the hospital as she fought West Nile. Within that narrative I tell the story of the panic the disease first caused when it arrived in the U.S., how it is spread, moves through a human body, the process in which the federal government decided to no longer push for a vaccine, how mosquito control is done, and most strikingly, how incredibly unprepared all of this had deinvesting has made us in light of the threat of climate change.
