Kathleen Z. Rooney
First discovered in Uganda in 1937, West Nile Virus made an abrupt debut in the Western Hemisphere 1999. The first cases centered in Queens, NY. In the 10 intervening years West Nile Virus has spread to 47 states and DC. To date there are 28,943 reported cases in the United States, with an estimate of upwards of 1.5 million actual cases.
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Within our state, the disease prefers urban settings to rural. In 2008, all cases reported to the CT state Department of Health were in Fairfield County, the majority in the cities of Stamford and Bridgeport.
Lyme Disease's history is pure Connecticut, although similar syndromes have been recorded in Europe since the late nineteenth century. The concrete definition of Lyme disease arose from a 1975-77 Yale study of the incidence of arthritis in Lyme, CT. While completing that study, Dr. Alan Steere consulted one of the country's leading experts in ticks, Dr. Willy Burgdorfer. Several years later, while studying Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Dr. Burgdorfer made the serendipitous discovery of spirochetes in the bodies of ticks he was dissecting. He related this to the Lyme study. Immediately, tests were done on samples from Lyme sufferers that confirmed the presence of matching antibodies to the bacteria samples Burgdorfer had discovered. The identification of the pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi that causes the syndrome has allowed effective treatments and diagnostic testing to be developed. Although Lyme disease has developed and spread in the rural parts of our state, the infections in urban New Haven County totaled 400 in 2008. According to Kirby Stafford III, Chief Scientist/State Entomologist at the Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, these reportable cases may only represent 10-16 percent of the total cases, due to the strict reporting criteria.
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Even so, Lyme disease is the most common vector borne disease in the United States.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines an emerging disease as "one that has appeared in a population for the first time, or that may have existed previously but is rapidly increasing in incidence or geographic range."
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WNV and Lyme disease have short and intense histories within our state. Both have increased in frequency and range in a short period of time and have quickly made themselves diseases of concern to our state. These diseases are "reportable", which means that physicians who diagnose the disease, as well as labs who detect presence of the disease in blood samples, are required to report these findings to the state. As the scrutiny of these new diseases continues, we will begin to see how they have evolved to their current level of threat. Chavers and Vermund in "Emerging Infectious Diseases" describe eight factors that contribute to the evolution of new diseases. We will look at four of these which have a great effect on the development of both diseases in our state. These are:
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Demographic factors including population growth and distribution
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Social and Behavioral changes
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Climate and environmental changes
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Microbial evolution
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