This West Nile thing has been going around on BirdChat since
it was first discovered (I finally had to make a kill file to
filter it out).

The guys at the center for disease control are charged with
monitoring the spread of disease. News people are charged
with reporting these in as interesting as possible ways.

I listened to the report and would like to emphasize:
1. most people who (probably) had the disease thought they
had severe flew and recovered. The death rate from this
repeatedly referred to as deadly disease is still way in
the background compared to almost every other preventable
cause of death (gun related deaths immediately comes to mind,
but that would be editorializing).
2. even though hundreds of bird were being sent to the lab,
it is not clear how many died of West Nile and how much was
an artifact of people suddenly becoming aware of dead birds.

Should the CDC take this seriously, of course. Should we
be concerned about preventing a disease that has the potential
to cause deaths, of course.

Should we bring back DDT as has been suggested?
Should we start anti-crow campaigns and "manage" bird migration
as has been suggested?

This is one of those issues that demands perspective, because
it's the kind of thing that the media likes to wave around
on those days when there's not enough bad weather or sex to
report on (oops, I'm editorializing again).

Diane Bag??s wrote:
>
> I heard the whole report. It has infected some 60 species to date, and is
> expected to be found throughout the country within 5 years.
>
> I would guess the entire report could be heard on NPR's web site using
> RealAudio or something similar. The report was done by Daniel Swerdling.
>
> Diane Bagues
> Milwaukie, Oregon
> dbagues at earthlink.net
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jack & Linda Kintner" <kintner at nas.com>
> To: <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
> Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 3:12 PM
> Subject: NPR report on West Nile Virus
>
> > You may not read this soon enough, but at the end of the first hour of
> "All Things Considered, " and probably also available on their website
> (npr.org), I heard the end of a report on the West Nile Virus. One of the
> physicians from Fort Collins, CO, wondered "How soon I'll be seeing dead
> crows in my yard?"
> >
> > What's our concern here? I hate to think of some kind of mass eradication
> program. What's been done so far in the east? The report said that the
> virus has been carried as far west as Lake Erie.
> >
> >

--
Mike Patterson Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo,
Astoria, OR it is not enough to be persecuted
celata at pacifier.com by an unkind establishment,
you must also be right.
---Robert Park
http://www.pacifier.com/~mpatters/bird/bird.html