A Planet of Viruses - Carl Zimmer [25]
As doctors struggled to make sense of the human outbreak, McNamara was finally getting the answer to her own mystery. The National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Iowa managed to grow viruses from the bird tissue samples she had sent them from the zoo. They bore a resemblance to the Saint Louis encephalitis virus. McNamara wondered now if both humans and birds were succumbing to the same pathogen. She convinced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to analyze the genetic material in the viruses. On September 22, the CDC researchers were stunned to find that the birds were not killed by Saint Louis encephalitics. Instead, the culprit was a pathogen called West Nile virus, which infects birds as well as people in parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa. No one had imagined that the Bronx Zoo birds were dying of West Nile virus, because it had never been seen in a bird in the Western Hemisphere before.
Public health workers puzzling over the human cases of encephalitics decided it was time to broaden their search as well. Two teams—one at the CDC and another led by Ian Lipkin, who was then at the University of California, Irvine—isolated the genetic material from the human viruses. It was the same virus that was killing birds: West Nile. And once again, it took researchers by surprise. No human in North or South America had ever suffered from it before.
The United States is home to many viruses that make people sick. Some are old and some are new. When the first humans made their way into the Western Hemisphere some fifteen thousand years ago, they brought a number of viruses with them. Human papillomavirus, for example, retains traces of its ancient emigration. The strains of the virus found in Native Americans are more closely related to each other than they are to HPV strains in other parts of the world. Their closest relative outside of the New World are strains of HPV found in Asia, just as Native Americans are most closely related to Asians.
Columbus’s discovery of the New World triggered a second wave of new viruses. Europeans brought viruses causing diseases such as influenza and smallpox that wiped out most Native Americans. In later centuries, still more viruses arrived. HIV came to the United States in the 1970s, and at the end of the twentieth century, West Nile virus became one of America’s newest immigrants.
It had only been six decades since West Nile virus was discovered anywhere on the planet. In 1937, a woman in the West Nile district of Uganda came to a hospital with a mysterious fever, and her doctors isolated a new virus from her blood. Over the next few decades, scientists found the same virus in many patients in the Near East, Asia, and Australia. But they also discovered that West Nile virus did not depend on humans for its survival. Researchers detected the virus in many species in birds, where it could multiply to far higher numbers.
At first it was not clear how the virus could move from human to human, from bird to bird, or from bird to human. That mystery was solved when scientists found the virus in a very different kind of animal: mosquitoes. When a virus-bearing mosquito bites a bird, it sticks its syringe-like mouth into the animal’s skin. As the mosquito drinks, it squirts saliva into the wound. Along with the saliva comes the West Nile virus.
The virus first invades cells in the bird’s skin, including immune system cells that are supposed to defend animals from diseases. Virus-laden immune cells crawl into the lymph nodes, where they release their passengers, leading to the infection of more immune cells. From