West Nile Virus

 West Nile encephalitis has no consistent symptoms, and no guarantee of disease. More than 99 percent of people who test positive have suffered nothing more serious than a recent fever, and those who do get ill are usually elderly and have other health problems.

Popularly considered to be mosquito-borne, this supposed virus was first identified in a Ugandan woman in the late 1930s. She denied being ill, but doctors used her blood to kill mice by injecting it directly into their brain, claiming this showed it caused fatal disease.

Epidemics have been claimed in several parts of the world since then, but in many places people test positive without any symptoms. Research in the 1950s found that more than 60 percent of people living in the upper Nile delta tested positive for the virus, although only a small minority displayed evidence of encephalitis (swelling of the brain).

West Nile virus was an obscure disease until 1999 when it was blamed for a high number of bird deaths in New York. It killed eight people, all 60 years old or over. At the time, 2.6 percent of healthy people surveyed tested positive for the virus, yet none reported symptoms more severe than a recent fever. There was no attempt to examine blood collected before 1999 to see if any were already positive.

How do we know that these tests are accurate? I asked both the Ontario and Canadian governments for the scientific basis for the tests but received only the instructions for running the tests. The limited public information reveals that the antibodies, antigens, and genetic materials used in the tests are extracted from impure materials, such as from the ground-up brains of diseased crows or the liquid surrounding virus/cell cultures.

A conversation with Colorado State University virologist Charles Calisher confirmed that virological experiments are always performed with impure materials, purification is rarely attempted, and non-specific signs, such as cell death, determines the presence of a virus.

If a virus is not responsible for West Nile encephalitis, what’s in the air to cause it? Jim West, a New York researcher, may have part of the answer. He noted that dead birds that tested positive in 1999 were found in the most polluted areas of New York City. The following summer in Ontario, a large number of dead birds were collected, but it was near Toronto and Windsor that the majority of positive birds were found.

The lack of evidence for purification of the virus shows that its existence has never been proven. People whose illness has been blamed on the West Nile virus should consider whether, prior to their illness, they were vaccinated recently, were living in an area with high levels of air pollution, or were exposed to chemicals or pharmaceuticals with neurological effects.