Talk:West Nile virus in the United States

The table looks good but the numbers need to be right-aligned so they can be better compared visually. --Hooperbloob 03:30, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

1999 NYC

I amended the intro to read..

The virus is believed to have entered in an infected bird or mosquito, although there is no clear evidence.

from

Current theory is that it was introduced accidentally by an air traveller who was infected before he arrived at New York.

...to bring it into line with the West Nile virus page. Sean.hoyland - talk 06:03, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

WNV & climate change

Any objection to adding something about how WNV followed a pattern of higher temperatures and extreme weather events across the US, thus demonstrating a possible link between climate change and the spread of an infectious disease?--CurtisSwain (talk) 12:42, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

Cases vz. reported cases.

I've glanced through a number of the MMWR items on the West Nile virus (and a few other reports, too). I notice, that the CDC talks about reported cases, and now and then mentions that the statistics from different jurisdictions are not completely comparable. Íf I understand this correctly, not all detected cases from everywhere are reported to the CDC. In particular, some jurisdictions do not report "non-neuroinvasive" cases, where the symptoms mainly are restricted to non-neurological ones.

Now, this is my interpretation of the primary sources, and by WP:OR, my interpretations are not valid wp sourcses. If someone finds a secondary or higher order source discussing this, we could include it. However, I'll do two things (and I admit I'm walking a thin line, but I hope I'm keeping the balance): We may use words like "reported" to a higher extent, and we may mention that the CDC estimates that there are more cases than those reported.

In the survey of the WNV disease situation in 2009, the CDC report estimates the actual number of persons infected 2009 to 54,000, while the reported number of cases is 720 (incidently, 1.5% of the estimated number). IMHO, this is a remarkably high discreptance. The explanation is rather terse. I quote verbatim (but only for the informational content):

"Calculating from the number of neuroinvasive disease cases and projections from 1999 serosurvey data, CDC estimated that 54,000 persons were infected with WNV in 2009, of whom 10,000 developed nonneuroinvasive WNV disease."

As for infected people not always developing typical WNV symptoms, I note that the CDC potentially has at least one other kind of data source. The WNV may be transmitted by blood transfer; whence blood donours are regularly tested for the infection. The infected persons thus detected then are followed up; Some develop illness; some of these develop typical "West Nile fever". However, when I glanced through some of the reports mentioning infected donours, considerably more that 1.5% of these donours seemed to develop typical WNV infection symptoms. My conclusion (very much OR, and of course not to be used in the article) is, that the report authors estimate that a substantial proportion of the typical cases either are never medically treated and diagnosticated, or are not reported from the local to the federal agencies.

Again, it is not our task to explain or interpret the discrepancy, or even to emphasize it. However, I think that we may mention it, which is what I plan to do. IMHO, the CDC estimate, written in the first paragraph of their summary, is in itself a fact of sufficient encyclopaedical interest. Whether or not the difference between the two numbers is surprising, and what the causes may be, we'll leave for pondering to the readers. JoergenB (talk) 17:56, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Reading our article a little more carefully, I notice that we do mention the discrepancy. I'll have nothing to add there; except the number; and a few changes of "observed" to "reported". (A case may be "observed" locally, but go on to be "unreported".) JoergenB (talk) 18:00, 7 July 2011 (UTC)