Last week, some were found in Stamford. There also has been a sharp increase in the number of dead birds found in Stamford, an early sign that the disease is spreading. Public health officials are caught in a difficult place. If they talk too much about the dangers of the virus, they might unnecessarily alarm the public. If they say too little, common sense measures won't be taken.
Statistics show that West Nile can be deadly.
But they also show that the risk of contracting it are small. Perhaps one out of 1,000 mosquitoes is a carrier of the disease. U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman released a congressional study yesterday about the handling of last year's West Nile outbreak. It faults the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which initially identified the wrong virus, failed to anticipate the nation's vulnerability to such threats, and failed to recognize the link between animal and human vulnerabilities to the disease. With the mosquitoes moving north, that's not exactly the kind of report you want to hear about.