“West Nile virus spreads faster,” reads the USA Today headline on a story that doesn’t actually say anything about rate of spread, just that the virus is spreading, as one would expect for a pathogen that was first seen in North America only thirteen years ago:
It’s going to get worse, says David Dausey, a professor of public health at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pa.
But no, this professional epidemiologist is not talking about the typical pattern of advance for a virulent new disease. Dausey is talking about a much smaller and vastly less certain factor:
He says climate change means warmer winters, milder springs and hotter summers, all of which “create a longer season for mosquitoes to breed and ideal conditions for them to survive.” That will mean more West Nile and, public health workers worry, other mosquito-borne diseases such as yellow fever, malaria and dengue fever, Dausey says.
So the fast spread of West Nile (or “faster” if you prefer) is not because this dangerous disease was only recently introduced (a fact not mentioned in the article), but because of global warming, even though neither the globe, nor the contiguous United States, have warmed since West Nile first appeared here, thirteen years ago, in 1999:
Then there’s this inconvenient report from last December:
Transmission of infectious parasites slows with rising temperatures, researchers find.
… The study was done with rodent malaria, but the researchers, at PennsylvaniaStateUniversity in University Park, expect the pattern to apply to human malaria and possibly to other mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever and West Nile virus.
Dausey is also from Pennsylvania. Maybe he ought to get out a little, or talk to someone besides the warming alarmists who control all the grant money. No credit to USA Today‘s Elizabeth Weise either. It’s not like its actually a mystery why West Nile is spreading, but our politicized media doesn’t want readers to know the truth. They only care about manipulating people for perceived partisan advantage.
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The CAGW bubble will pop but there is no telling how big the bubble will be before it pops.
From the CDC website about West Nile Virus:
Serious Symptoms in a Few People.
About one in 150 people infected with WNV will develop severe illness. The severe symptoms can include high fever, headache, neck stiffness, stupor, disorientation, coma, tremors, convulsions, muscle weakness, vision loss, numbness and paralysis. These symptoms may last several weeks, and neurological effects may be permanent.
Milder Symptoms in Some People.
Up to 20 percent of the people who become infected have symptoms such as fever, headache, and body aches, nausea, vomiting, and sometimes swollen lymph glands or a skin rash on the chest, stomach and back. Symptoms can last for as short as a few days, though even healthy people have become sick for several weeks.
No Symptoms in Most People.
Approximately 80 percent of people (about 4 out of 5) who are infected with WNV will not show any symptoms at all.
No worries.
George E. Smith says:
August 15, 2012 at 12:54 pm
“””””…..Brant Ra says:
August 15, 2012 at 11:50 am
@ur momisugly paddylol “The ability to eradicate mosquito borne disease is readily available. It is called DDT. Theri is a plethora of legitimate research that concludes that DDT does not pose a danger to humans, animals or birds.”
Really??…..”””””
So Brant, how many humans are known to have died from DDT poisoning, since it was first used as a mosquito control for Malaria and other tropical diseases.
=========
For practical purposes DDT is not immediately toxic to humans. But the molecule sticks around a long time in the environment. The reason it was banned from indiscriminate spraying was that it was building up over time in the bodies of upper level predators and for some reason it caused birds like ospreys and bald eagles to lay thin shelled eggs that cracked before the chicks matured. Why should that worry you? You are a top level predator.
BTW, it used to be the case the the use of DDT for disease control was still permitted when there is no reasonable alternative. I believe that’s still the case. What is banned is the indiscriminate use of DDT to control agricultural pests and non-disease carrying insects.
How is it that a warming planet just happens to be beneficial for bad mosquitoes and viruses yet is harmful for all the good things living on earth? It defies reason. It’s almost as if the premise that “global warming is evil” has now become an undisputed conclusion. All things bad must be caused by global warming and all predictions must fall inline with that axiom to be “approved” by the gatekeepers.
Dallas, Texas mayor Weds. declared a WNV state of emergency after 465 human cases, with some dying. Texas had a “rainy spring” which came following a notorious drought; just like my above linked epidemiology study.
The drought brings the birds to fewer water sources, the mosquitos had more opportunity to bite those birds & the result is more hosting of WNV in the viral vector process. Spraying is going forward from in Texas & other states now that Center Disease Control recording almost 700 human WNV cases in USA.
If ospreys and bald eagles are worth the deaths of millions of humans, then how fast will they be dismantling the raptor slaying wind turbines? It’s for the raptors!
Mr. Obama – tear down those windmills!
Don K have a read on this about DDT and edd shell thinning,
http://junkscience.com/1999/07/26/100-things-you-should-know-about-ddt/#ref6
Egg shell, not edd shell, keyboards and I have a love hate relationship.
The only proper way to understand the spread of the West Nile virus is to think of it as a newly arrived invasive foreign species. From a few grow many. Global warming has nothing to do with it. How many mating pairs of strange animals have been dropped off at the side of the road by pet owners who grew tired of them. They start to spread if they have no natural enemies. Do we blame global warming for that?
How West Nile got here we don’t know but if it doesn’t kill its new local hosts it will spread. If it finds our local mesquitoes compatible hosts it will spread. Global warming has nothing to do with it. The article is beyond silly.
Eugne WR Gallun
dp says
Mr. Obama — tear down those windmills!
Beyond funny! I am totally jealous! Impossible to top!
Eugene WR Gallun
Here in Australia we are having a normal cold winter, younger people that have not seen normal are amazed that spiders, roaches and other bugs are dying off. What a shame, tell them that is normal and they stare at you. But they are starting to come around.
Nik nails it exactly, painting a perfect portrait of the masochistic eco-tards infesting our area.
In addition to despising fracking and also the various pipelines they now have their sights set upon killing Indian Point, a nuke plant that supplies 30% of the juice used by the vermin in the city. It should be noted that the current Governor Cuomo, swept into office with great cognitive dissonance and the support of every newspaper including the Post, is the son of the earlier Governor Mario Cuomo who killed the fully completed multi-billion dollar Shoreham nuke plant before it could even generate a single watt!
History is chock full of fabled siege stories of great military planning, execution and significance. However I cannot think of a single time where the city under siege ever intentionally did it to themselves by severing all the energy supply lines in such an act of cognitive suicide. Perhaps we should just skip to the end of this story and build a wall around it and call it Escape From New York.
Coincidentally, from the International Society for Infectious Diseases Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases – ProMED – http://www.promedmail.org/?p=2400:1000: Archive Number: 20120816.1246423 Date: Tue 14 Aug 2012 Source: US CDC [edited] http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/westnile/index.htm
Thus far in 2012, 43 states have reported West Nile virus [WNV] infections in people, birds, or mosquitoes. A total of 693 cases of West Nile virus disease in people, including 26 deaths, have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Of these, 406 (59 per cent) were classified as neuro-invasive disease (such as meningitis or encephalitis), and 287 (41 per cent) were classified as non-neuro-invasive disease.
The 693 cases reported thus far in 2012 are the highest number of West Nile virus disease cases reported to CDC through the 2nd week of the month of August since West Nile virus was 1st detected in the United States in 1999. Over 80 per cent of the cases have been reported from 6 states (Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and California), and almost half of all cases have been reported from Texas.
—
communicated by: ProMED-mail from HealthMap Alerts
[This report does not offer reasons why human WNV infections are occurring early in the transmission season. Many states are experiencing drought conditions this summer [2012], which would lead one to postulate that WNV mosquito populations ought to be lower than usual, with reduced probability of transmission. Or perhaps the susceptible cohort of wild bird WNV host populations is greater than usual. Or perhaps people are being less careful about avoiding mosquito bites. It will be interesting to see which factors are involved in this spike in cases as studies are completed. It will also be interesting to learn how many patients convalescent from WNV infections develop chronic kidney disease, as reported in ProMED-mail archive no. 20120714.1202043 below.
A HealthMap/ProMED-mail map showing the locations of the states mentioned in this report can be accessed at http://healthmap.org/r/01bw. – Mod.TY]
BS all the way down. Even the old DDT “eggshell” conviction is dubious. The research was spotty, amateurish, and showed severe symptoms of fudging and data snoopy editing.
As an interesting side note, DDT is not even an insecticide. It is a strong persistent repellent.
I live in the south of France where mean temperatures are about 4°C warmer than the English Midlands where I spent most of my working life. The mosquito population is about one percent of what it was up north! Why? Lack of standing water. I remember talking to a French agricultural labourer who said that the entire coastal fringe was almost uninhabitable before it was drained and sprayed with DDT after WW11. Mussolini did the same with the Pontine Marshes, freeing a malarial swamp where life expectancy was 35 years into a rich environment for 500 000 people.
Oh! and just in case anyone should suggest it: I have no fascist sympathy.
If I understand the logic, the drought is causing standing water where there was once flowing water. This allows more mosquitoes to reproduce. OK, that’s plausible. I’ll buy that.
However, there is no evidence the drought is caused by AGW. The drought hasn’t exceeded any natural variation experienced in the past. There is no evidence of climate change at work here. Malaria was also common throughout this country before we drained the swamps and took other measures to control mosquitoes.
Anybody who knows anything knows these facts. Journalists, politicians, bureaucrats and other wondrous products of our education system evidently don’t know that.
In my view, much of the best evidence on climate change comes from data on species distributions and seasonal phenology. When I typed “”Climate change and species distributions into Google Scholar I got about 1/2 a million hits. Many of the best review papers date back to the early 2000’s (2000 to 2006) and document changes in geographical distributions (northward in the northern hemisphere) of thousands of species. These species were probably not influenced by UHI or weather station siting. Phenology refers to the seaonal timing of events such as flowering, breeding and migration. Earlier occurence in these events have been noted in thousands of species. Many studies also docment the movement of plant species to higher altitudinal elevations. I can tell you that such scientific students have accelerated in recent year. When I was in a scientific meeting in Europe, I was impressed by the number of studies reporting the first appearance of plants from Spain, Portugal and France in The Netherlands and Germany. I guess that the fact that European countrys are small compared to the US accentuates reporting on these northward species invasions.
If you want to doubt or discount these studies, try going to Google Scholar. Many studies are behind the “pay walls,” but there are thousands that can be downloaded for free by anyone. Articles in Science and Nature are also readily available at many libraries. Read ten or a hundred or a thousand studies and see what you think. Although some knowledge of statistics is helpful, such data and evidence is readily understood by a general, nonspecialist audience.
BillD says: August 16, 2012 at 6:47 am
I don’t doubt what you say you found via Google Scholar, however, consider this. One can go to the treeline, in altitude, and see dead trees above where trees can currently live. Therefore, it used to be warmer. I find the perceptible ‘migration’ questionable as fraction of a degree over a century or more is pretty insignificant, further we constantly discover species previously unseen. Having had an ‘endangered’ lynx at my back door, eight years prior to their “re-introduction”, I’m not impressed with the census of wildlife nor plants.
Steve Keohane says:
August 15, 2012 at 10:20 am
Mosquitoes need standing, still water to reproduce. They don’t do well in drought.
_____________________________
Therefore we can blame the EPA who will not let you drain a mud puddle in your drive much less a swamp.
(A friend had his congressman out to show him the “Swamp” the EPA refused to allow him to fill in. And yeah it was a hole in his dirt driveway! )
Here are a couple more cases:
Man sentenced to three years for cleaning-up an illegal dump site and adding topsoil
OH, and you can steal a semi-truck and trailer use it all over the country and get a MAX of 2 months probation. Go figure.
Ixodes phenology boggles the conventional mind, with or without statistics.
An empirical quantitative framework for the seasonal population dynamics of the tick Ixodes ricinus. International Journal for Parasitology 32 (2002) 979-989)
@ur momisugly Brian H says: “DDT is not even an insecticide. It is a strong persistent repellent.”
LOL That is the most moronic statement about DDT I have ever seen. DDT only acts as an irritant to mosquitoes after they have developed immunity to it’s lethal effects. This does not take long, with resistance to DDT developing in just 2 – 3 years in the tropics.
The main reason that DDT use declined and stopped was because it STOPPED killing the insect targeted due to insecticide resistance.
All these idiots think DDT is a magic bullet that can save the world. NOT. It is like many other human solutions – temporary. Life will adapt and survive. BTW, USA bedbugs populations are 100% resistant to DDT.
BTW, that picture appears to be the wrong genus of mosquito. West Nile is generally spread by Culex species.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culex
****
Doug Huffman says:
August 15, 2012 at 1:14 pm
The spread of Lyme Disease and its vector tick Ixodes are attributed to a warming climate
****
Most likely the deer-population explosion…..
“””””…..
BioBob says:
August 16, 2012 at 9:54 am
@ur momisugly Brian H says: “DDT is not even an insecticide. It is a strong persistent repellent.”
LOL That is the most moronic statement about DDT I have ever seen. DDT only acts as an irritant to mosquitoes after they have developed immunity to it’s lethal effects. This does not take long, with resistance to DDT developing in just 2 – 3 years in the tropics.
The main reason that DDT use declined and stopped was because it STOPPED killing the insect targeted due to insecticide resistance……”””””
Always happy to read info from those in the know.
The massive spraying of people and anything else, as I saw on film footage in the 40s, probably helped hasten the diminution of its effectiveness. By the same token, such massive overspraying possibly helped exacerbate whatever deleterious effects that DDT may have had on birds and other species. Who knows; more judicious application of DDT to the problem might have reduced both the rapid adaptation, and also the negative effects.
I seem to recall that DDT in the environment itself is not such a problem; but evidently bacterial mechanisms change it to something called DDE, which is the agent that is for the birds.
But then at my age, I seem to recall all kinds of stuff that may not be reliable. Maybe Myth Busters can do an expose on DDT.
I know that row crop farmers used machines that went down their geometrically laid out fields, and sprayed herbicides; not on the crop, but on the gap between the rows, with the aim of eliminating weeds and such that soaked up water, and also robbed the soil of nutrients wanted for the crop.
Well if all went according to plan, there shouldn’t be any weeds in that gap anyway, so most of that herbicide was wasted spraying the dirt.
A friend of mine developed a smart spray head, that illuminated the ground with multicolored plus infra red LEDs, and then looked for the spectral reflectance signal. Most of the time they got a boring dirt spectrum, so they didn’t spray anything; but now and then, that Chlorophyl IR signal would come back at them designating some weed or other was there. Then ZAP !! the weed got blasted. Farmers don’t like to spend money on pesticides or herbicides to spray on dirt or farm workers, or anything else but pests.
A couple of things. First, I think it is a little far-fetched that mosquitoes could kill a cow–unless that cow was at death’s door anyway.
Second, some people like an Oxford comma. Do I have a vote for an NYC paragraph? 🙂
It is at least plausible that global warming would put some parts of the Earth at risk for insect-borne diseases that they had never been threatened by before. Boreal forests in Alaska are being severely damaged by beetles that have become able to survive at high northern latitudes only recently, thanks to rising temperatures. The trees have no defenses against these beetles; we can assume, then, that the trees evolved in an environment where the beetles didn’t exist. If El-Nino is causing this warming, then we need to find out why we are experiencing a series of El-Ninos whose strength is unprecedented in the evolutionary history of the trees in Alaska’s forests.