“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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The dry summer in eastern Canada resulted in a sharp drop in mosquitos and biting flies. I noticed I could sit out on my patio in the evenings without protection. Also, I visited a mining exploration project in central Quebec in what is usually the height of the “fly season” and spent the day rambling over outcrops without the need for repellent – so I would take the idea of hot and dry out of the equation for good conditions for the West Nile V. The rest of it I leave to entymologists to speculate on.
I’ve battled flies and mosquitos from Yukon/Northern BC, the Precambrian of Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania in my work and study from the middle 50s to the present – I consider myself somewhat of an expert in this narrow specialty in the same manner that the Innuit are experts on snow and ice. I may have invented the counter-orbiting cast iron frying pan method for knocking down moose flys that get into an orbit around your head. Dungerpooching, I have practiced, but I learned this from a New Brunswicker – you stick a pine nettle up the rear of a large moose fly and the counterweight won’l allow it to level off and it rockets vertically out of sight. Also, about 40 years ago I bought a T-shirt in Whitehorse that bragged the greatest air show on earth between June and August, but I found my flying friends not nearly as voracious as they are north of Lake Superior.
Oh and to give you a flavour of the central presence of flies and mosquitos in geological field camps, a late mining colleague of mine who became deputy minister of the Ministry of Energy Mines and Resources (probaly now called |Resources and Sustainable Development or some such) wrote his biography entitled, “From Black Flies and Mosquitos to Black Ties and Tuxedos”. He was a bit of a poet.
It’s back in the news: http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/22/health/west-nile-virus/index.html
It’s possible that the total number of WNV cases in Texas this year will approach the total cases of 2,202 from 1999 to 2011 in the lone star state. Already this is the largest number of cases ever recorded in Texas of WNV by this date in August. The largest number of cases in Texas for a single year (2003) was between 700-800. CDC has the exact number.
There seems to be a misconception going around about drought and stagnant water. Drought conditions contribute to water stagnation until the point of complete evaporation of pooled water no longer being supplied by rain. At some pooint all the pools will dry up and the insect vectors depending on water for their larval life cycles will diminish.
Sophmoric arguments either linking this outbreak to global warming or denying that AGW is happening doesn’t do anyone who has become sick or died of this disease any good.