West Nile Virus: why now? where did it come from? In the Washington DC area, this fall is very different from last fall; this time of year, I usually see a line of crows cheerfully cawing at me when I leave the house and I would tell them to move on and quit spl*tting all over our cars. Now our street is eerily silent. Th crows are gone, decimated. Instead, we find dead crows, dead blue birds and dead squirrels. So when I read the following, I wondered if there was more to West Nile  than just dumb coincidence with 9/11.

In a previously unreleased letter obtained by BusinessWeek, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention admitted that the CDC supplied Iraqi scientists with nearly two dozen viral and bacterial samples in the 1980s, including the plague, West Nile, and dengue fever. The letter, written in 1995 by then-CDC director David Satcher, was in response to a congressional inquiry. [source: John Robb's Radio weblog]

Related: CDC on West Nile, Fight the Bite: West Nile Virus, USDA on West Nile, CDC list of city and state health agencies: http:// www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/westnile/city_states.htm
California West Nile Virus Surveillance Information Center: http://westnile.ca.gov
California Vectorborne Disease Surveillance System: http://vector.ucdavis.edu/surveillance/administration/contact_us.html
American Mosquito Control Association: http://www.mosquito.org
West Nile Virus Surveillance Information (Canada), Morflex, Inc: http://www.deet.com

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