{"id":38,"date":"2008-09-05T05:55:01","date_gmt":"2008-09-05T10:55:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/pov\/hiv-id-observations\/?p=38"},"modified":"2008-09-05T05:55:01","modified_gmt":"2008-09-05T10:55:01","slug":"west-nile-virus-and-friday-night-lights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/west-nile-virus-and-friday-night-lights\/2008\/09\/05\/","title":{"rendered":"West Nile Virus and Friday Night Lights"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0town of Braintree, just south of Boston, has cancelled Friday night high school football games <\/a>until the first frost of the year due to concerns about West Nile.\u00a0 Apparently the campus has a lake and wetlands,\u00a0 good breeding grounds for mosquitoes.\u00a0 “This is all in the name of safety,” says the school headmaster.<\/p>\n

(If someone were\u00a0doing a presentation on “How Massachusetts Differs from Texas”, this move is Exhibit 1.)<\/p>\n

When West Nile encephalitis first appeared in Boston in the Summer of 2000, there were newspaper articles about how parents would rush their children from house to car on summer evenings to avoid mosquito bites; lots of debate over the relative safety of various chemical repellents; people scrutinized their neighbors’ yards for suspicious bird baths or, worse, old tires with stagnant water.<\/p>\n

This all seemed to me a variant on a commonly-observed inability for us humans to figure out relative risk.\u00a0 Which was more dangerous, a few mosquito bites on a summer evening,\u00a0or the drive in the car?\u00a0 We fear what we can’t control — especially creepy microbes, bugs, germs, yuck\u00a0— and if anything can be done to reduce this risk further, even if it’s from a 1 in a million to a 1 in 10 million chance, let’s do it.\u00a0 (See rabies prevention<\/a>, for another example.)<\/p>\n

By contrast, we have the illusion of control over things like car safety, when in fact most car accidents happen suddenly —\u00a0 no warning \u2013- and we have no control at all over the driver trying to find his sunglasses while talking on the cellphone after having a few too many. People are more concerned with feeling<\/em> safe than being<\/em> safe — just try to convince the driver of a large SUV otherwise.<\/p>\n

This is not to diminish the potential seriousness of West Nile disease — a colleague of mine’s father died of it in California several years ago — but the reality is that so far this year in Massachusetts there have been zero human cases<\/a>; last year there were 6<\/a> (3 encephalitis, 3 fever).\u00a0 Less than 1% of people who become infected with West Nile virus will develop severe illness.\u00a0 Most people who get infected with West Nile\u00a0do not develop any disease at all, and the elderly — not high school football players — are at the greatest risk for encephalitis.<\/p>\n

As a 140-pounder when wet, I can think of lots of good safety reasons\u00a0reasons not to play high school tackle football on Friday nights — but the risk of West Nile isn’t one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0town of Braintree, just south of Boston, has cancelled Friday night high school football games until the first frost of the year due to concerns about West Nile.\u00a0 Apparently the campus has a lake and wetlands,\u00a0 good breeding grounds for mosquitoes.\u00a0 “This is all in the name of safety,” says the school headmaster. (If someone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,9],"tags":[323,626,990],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care","category-infectious-diseases","category-policy","tag-encephalitis","tag-mosquito","tag-west-nile-virus"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}