West Nile virus is moving into the central Sacramento valley. There was a lot of media coverage of it a few months ago and when talking to a custodian at my local community college, I found out his supervisor got West Nile and was unable to work for five months; he was in his mid 50's. I was worried about this because I am taking a Swimming class there and for the first few weeks this semester the mosquitos were out in full force, and were biting like crazy. There is a creek behind campus where they probably spawn, but we had a period of very cold weather here, an the mosquitos dissapeared; my friend says temps below 30 degrees kills them off. But, they have staggered gestation periods and a new batch will hatch sooner or later.

What about you? Any West Nile in your area?

every year, and I protect myself with sprays and stuff

The brother of a very good friend of mine died from West Nile two years ago here in south-central PA.

IIRC, it's in pretty much all of NY State, and we've had an extremely mild winter this year, so it may be worse this year than in past years.


-K

It's been in western Colo. for the past couple of years.

IIRC, Garfield County where I live is one of the hottest spots in the state for West Nile.

Leftists in my city are preventing the spraying of insecticides to kill West Nile-carrying mosquitos.  There is plenty of West Nile around here, many birds have died from it.

My neighbor died from it last year,we always had alot of dead birds around but the CDC never seemed to care.

Yeah, we had tons of dead birds here too.

What you woulnd't expect though, considering how Liberal this area is, is that we recently had whole swaths of our county sprayed from the air for West Nile, and there were no protests to be found.

I'm in the San Gabriel Valley(10 miles east of Los Angeles), and we have the West Nile Virus for 3 years.  There have been so many reports of dead crows birds etc in the yards of many people in my city that  L.A. County of Animal Regulation doesn't even bother to pickup the dead birds and have them analyzed for the West Nile Virus anymore.  There has been something like 10 deaths of elderly people reported in the surrounding counties of Riverside, San Bernardino counties.  Right now you should be safe from the virus because mosquitos are pretty inactive during the cold weather, but of course as the weather warms watch out.  I would just sure to stay away from known areas of mosquitos, ie areas with standing water that can bred  them during the peak times of their activity, ie hours around sun up and sun down.  Get and use insect repellant if you're going to be out and about.

Its in the CO front range area.  Kills a couple of horses and people every year.

Only 4 confirmed human cases in NC for 2005.