TAKE WEST NILE VIRUS SERIOUSLY: A CASE FROM 2002

By Juan Montoya
The discovery of a mosquito infected with the West Nile virus at the Galaxia Subdivision near the Rio Grande just west of Las Prietas this week brought back memories of my first encounter with the disease back in 2002.
I was working for a small newspaper in Worthington, Minnesota, a typical Midwestern town that had seen an influx of minorities from all over hte word – including a sizable population of Hispanics from the Southwest, the West, and even from far off places like Guatemala and El Salvador.

The first indication that the West Nile virus was being carried by mosquitoes was first indicated when people saw dead birds on the ground or struggling to walk on the ground as if they had been poisoned. Birds, you see, are carriers of the virus. When mosquitoes bite a bird, they transmit the disease wherever they fly. When a mosquito bites another animal, they inturn carry the virus into the animal's bloodstream.

In that little town in southwest Minnesota, some of the first victims were animals like horses, that had to be shot or treated by local vets when they began to display the symptoms of having been bitten by the disease-carrying mosquitoes.

The horses of the local sheriff – a dour, rural lawman who made money housing undocumented immigrants who arrived to work at the local hog slaughterhouse and got into trouble in town – were some of the first animal casualties. They were fine-looking animals but had to be quarantined after they showed the first symptoms of the disease. The vaccines, though hard to get, were made available and they eventually survived.

As alarming as this was, I asked local health authorities if there were any local human victims reported locally who might have been bitten by disease-carrying mosquitoes and they got me in touch with 83-year-old Lucille Tryon. She was the first known human case of the disease in the state.

Like many elderly rural women, Lucille loved her garden. There was hardly a place on her back yard that wasn't blossoming or blooming. The porch around her home was filled with flower pots bursting with color from the flowers she  grew.

In her back yard, local varieties of flowers formed a colorful natural fence. 

 But there was also something else growing there. Mosquitoes, swarms of them. And among them, apparently, were some that had been infected by the virus.

 "I had dizzy spells and was feeling just awful and I had a lump on the back of my neck and my neck was sore," she said.  "I had West Nile."

The woman, who had never relied on anyone to get around, had to spend the better part of a month hospitalized to recover from the virus. But for a while, it was touch and go and doctors gave her a slim chance of survival.

"I had a cane and a walker but I hated to have people see that lady out there with a walker," she told another reporter who did a story on her survival a year later.

She says she never paid attention to the mosquitoes while she spent hours with her flowers.

 "I don't know that I'm recovered yet!" she said.

In South Texas, where many retired elderly or housewives delight in spending their time cultivating their matas, the danger is very real that they might come in contact with an infected mosquito. Like many locals, I myself have two parents who after they raised their kids, dogs, grandkids, etc., like to spend their time cultivating their gardens where they raise – besides flowers – other plants and vegetables such as piquines or tomatoes.

We must communicate to them that this exotic virus is very real and very dangerous, especially to the elderly with lower immunity. There is no cause for alarming them, of course. But precaution of this new danger in the air is something we should communicate with them.