I think sometimes our modern enthusiasms will be the death of us.

I have mentioned my friend who is a professor at the university in Lund, Sweden, who studies the genetics of mosquito digestion.

Two things she has mentioned to me in conversation, one being that West Nile was a great boon to mosquito research, as the money taps got opened up. The other thing, was the phenomenon of “airport malaria”, where someone presents at hospital, tests for malaria, and never ever went anywhere where malaria is endemic.

Fortunately, the numbers are so small, that it is unlikely to be re-introduced, but keep in mind that malaria used to be endemic to much of the US and Canada, and we have several mosquito species that can still carry malaria, so if enough infected people come to North America, it could theoretically get reintroduced……

Basic idea he had was that if you got sick, before you got your over-the-counter meds, you went to the pharmacist, they handed you a sampling kit (anonymized, but with the ability to find you again, if need be…) and you’d turn in samples for analysis to see what was ailing you. Likewise, you go into the doctor, you get sampled.

This would allow epidemiologists to get a handle on what’s actually out there and active in the population, enabling public health officials to get out in front of anything going on. Back in the 1990s, this would have been massively expensive, but now…? Maybe not so much. And, it would enable the creation of an actual public health survey of national health.

Right now, unless you go in and have testing done for it, nobody is doing this sort of thing. His idea was that you surveyed across the population, not just the folks who got hit hard enough to go into the doctor. He also wanted to have it set up so that the person being swabbed would report their symptoms and severity, because the point he made was that every strain hit everyone differently. There was some stuff that was so low-level that it never made the scopes for the folks doing epidemiology, but the disease spread across the country with a speed that was breathtaking, when they went to look at it.

One of the things that came up while I was talking to him was that there was a lot of suspicious speed to how West Nile virus got from where it had its toehold in the Northeast to the West coast so damn fast. Per what he was saying, classically it would have taken years for that disease to get out to the Pacific Northwest, but that it was literally a blink of the epidemiological eye before it was being reported in the West. There was also an interesting association with the way the disease “hot spots” were centered on a lot of western US university campuses that had a lot of Middle Eastern students.

Some of that could have been explained away by other means, but there were an awful lot of “interesting” connective potentials there. Particularly since the strain of West Nile that was prevalent across the US was very close to the one our genius academics had sent blithely off to Iraq back in the late 1980s and 1990s…