A 74-year-old woman died of West Nile
Fever in Reggio Emilia overnight, the local health authority
said Wednesday.
The woman had been severely immuno-depressed.
She had been in hospital since August 7.
She died late Tuesday night from West Nile associated
meningoencephalitis and a concomitant infection from Covid-19.
It is the second death from the fever in Emilia-Romagna after
the recent death of an 88-year-old man in Ferrara.
Another man died of West Nile Fever near
Brescia on Thursday. He was from Cigole, south of Brescia.
He had been hospitalised recently.
He was one of the two more serious patients of four West Nile
cases in and around the Lombardy city.
His death brought to 11 Italy's death toll from the virus since
the start of June.
West Nile virus cases have risen 53% in Italy in the last seven
days, the Higher Health Institute (ISS) said Thursday.
The number of cases has risen from 94 to 144, from the beginning
of June to Tuesday August 9, the ISS said.
Four people have now died of the virus in the last week, taking
the overall death toll up to 11, all in northern Italy.
There have been six deaths in Veneto, two in Piedmont, two in
Lombardy and one in Emilia-Romagna.
West Nile virus (WNV) is a single-stranded RNA virus that causes
West Nile fever. It is a member of the family Flaviviridae, from
the genus Flavivirus, which also contains the Zika virus, dengue
virus, and yellow fever virus.
The virus is primarily transmitted by mosquitoes, mostly species
of Culex.
The primary hosts of WNV are birds, so that the virus remains
within a "bird-mosquito-bird" transmission cycle. The virus is
genetically related to the Japanese encephalitis family of
viruses.
Humans and horses both exhibit disease symptoms from the virus,
and symptoms rarely occur in other animals. Identification of
the human disease was first made in 1937 in Uganda and in the
latter half of the 20th century spread to many other parts of
the world.
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