Another West Nile victim in Italy. It is a 92-year-old with an already complex clinical picture who died at the Maggiore hospital in Novara after contracting the disease transmitted by mosquitoes.
15 cases have been detected since June, 5 victims .
And Walter Ricciardi raises the alarm: “Even in our country the climatic conditions are developing so that mosquitoes live all year round. This increases the risk of infections transmitted by them such as the West Nile virus, which for years has not killed many people in Italy ” .
"Mosquito-borne diseases - he added - continue to circulate and going at this rate we will have others, including the risk of the return of malaria ", added Ricciardi, recalling that heat waves "increase favorable conditions for the development of vectors such as the mosquito, which is the main killer in the world and kills especially in Africa, where temperatures are always high ".
Pietro Garavelli, head of the infectious diseases department of the Novara hospital, excludes the epidemic: “ The virus has existed for years in our area and is almost never detected, because in the majority there are no symptoms and only in rare cases slight disturbances . Very, very rarely in the elderly it causes encephalitis that can be fatal, especially in an already weakened body ".
(Unioneonline / L)
