Richard all better

[dreamshark]

By mid-week he was feeling pretty good, but still a little weak.  We went to a movie at the Lagoon on Wednesday and had to walk about 1/4 mile from parking.  A couple of days earlier  that would have been too much, but to his surprise it was no problem.  The rash was the last symptom to disappear.  It faded very gradually for a few days.  This morning it is completely gone.  So he was sick for almost exactly a week, but not really very sick.  The most dramatic symptom was the rash; the most debilitating was the fatigue.

He never did see a doctor.  I talked him into calling his clinic (the Park Nicollet Blaisdell/Franklin one) on Tuesday, just to see if they were interested in diagnosing a case of West Nile for the records.  They weren't especially.  The nurse was interested in the rash and thought that some of the doctors :might like to see it," but it didn't sound like anyone would even bother to do a blood test if he went in.  And yes, there is a simple blood test for this thing.  According to the most recent Strib article, 10 of the 32 diagnosed cases so far in Minnesota were detected in blood donors that had no symptoms. Other than that, I guess the only way this disease is being tracked is in the tiny minority of people that get sick enough to be hospitalized.  Such is the state of epidemiology in the most medically advanced country on earth. 

There was a dead sparrow on our front steps on Thursday morning. 

Comments

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I was glad to hear he's doing so much better and hope things clear up entirely real soon.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

I'm appalled that no one was interested in tracking it. Though I'll bet that Vector Control would be interested if you told them. In Santa Clara County, they'll come out and pick up dead birds if they're fresh enough and even report back to you what they find. Maybe West Nile is a bigger deal here.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are people trying to track it, but I don't know how you get hold of them. One of the articles in the paper mentioned that "investigators" were following up on some suspected cases, but did not say who those investigators were. State Health Department, maybe?

When WN first arrived in the Twin Cities (10 years ago?) they were asking people to report dead birds, but I don't think they're doing that any more. When the disease first arrived here, birds (esp. crows) were dropping out of the sky all over the place. You don't see that any more. I imagine that the local bird population becomes resistant pretty quickly, birds breeding as fast as they do.

The problem with disease tracking in this country is that the people whose job it is to do that have no connection with the people whose job is to treat sick people.

Is the really an organization in Santa Clara County called "Vector Control?"

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Indeed there is! Vector Control

Although they are mostly concerned with the animals than the humans. Nothing said about how to report a human case, so possibly the same situation that you had.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I'm glad whatever it is was ephemeral. Yeah, they (you know, "them") should have paid more attention to R's symptoms, but it sounds like things are being handled.

[pameladean]

I'm glad Richard is doing so much better. It's weird that they don't want to track West Nile, though.

P.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the "they" that tracks disease is a different "they" from the ones that treat those diseases.

[carbonel]

There was a dead crow on my front walk on Thursday. I'd assumed that it did itself in on the front window; I never considered West Nile virus as a possibility.