Fairfax County has recorded the commonwealth’s first human case of West Nile Virus this year, according to the county’s health department.
A 61-year-old Fairfax City man was hospitalized late last month with what turned out to be the typically nonfatal mosquito-borne disease, the department announced this week.
The man was “quite sick” but recovered from the virus, said Jorge Arias, the county’s supervisor for the disease-carrying insect program. Samples recently returned from a state lab in Richmond confirmed it as the state’s first human West Nile infection.
“In 80 percent of the cases, the people don’t even know they’re infected,” said Arias, who expects more human cases to crop up this year because of the unusually high number of infected mosquitos.
“I have one of these little butterfly feelings that we’re going to have two or three more cases this year,” he said. “I hope we don’t.”
Fairfax County also recorded the first mosquito-borne case of West Nile in Virginia in 2006, when a insect pool was found to bear the virus earlier this summer. Since then, the county has recorded a higher rate of infected bugs than in either of the past two years, according to Arias.
