NBC News got rare access to the federal health agency’s insect lab in Colorado where scientists study the spread of mosquitoes and the illnesses they carry.
NBCNews.com | July 29, 2023, 3:35 PM EDT / Updated July 30, 2023, 7:12 PM EDT
By Erika Edwards
John VanDenBerg suspects he was gardening when a mosquito got him.
It was September 2018, and VanDenBerg, then 67, had been feeling a little “off” for a few days, he said, like maybe he had the flu.
But one morning, as he was walking out of his Colorado home, he collapsed.
“I just went down,” VanDenBerg said. “That’s the last I remember for quite some time.”
VanDenBerg had a severe form of West Nile virus, caused by a single mosquito bite.
He developed inflammation in his brain. He lost his ability to read and write. His arms and legs stiffened with paralysis.
“I didn’t know whether my mobility would ever come back,” he said. “It was a pretty scary time.”
The rise of West Nile
While this summer saw the first locally acquired cases of another illness linked to mosquitoes, malaria, in two decades, it’s West Nile virus — and the mosquitoes that spread it — that most worries federal health officials.
Those bugs, a species of mosquitoes called Culex, are the CDC’s “primary concern in the continental U.S. right now,” said Roxanne Connelly, a medical entomologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.