Crows Die in Winter, New York State (2) (Modified by Environmental Risk Analysis Program)

[1] Dominick Ninivaggi <Dominick.Ninivaggi@co.suffolk.ny.us>
[2] Cathy Mc < birdlady@bdol.com>

[1]
It will be interesting to see if WNV was the cause of death. As the
report notes, there is now evidence that WNV is no longer nearly 100%
fatal for crows, as it was in the early years of WNV, so the birds
could be positive but something else killed them. Crow-to-crow
transmission of WNV is known in the lab, so that is possible. I
suspect we are seeing resistance in the crows, since the same strain of
virus (NY-99) continues to circulate. Evolution in action. Crows may
be losing their usefulness as sentinels for WNV.

Dominick V. Ninivaggi \ ()
Superintendent \ \__ () /
Division of Vector Control \____\ ()___/
Suffolk County DPW \\()/
335 Yaphank Avenue ======OO08<----
Yaphank, NY 11980 ____//()\___
Voice:631-852-4270 / __/ () \
FAX: 631-852-4140 / / () \
                                             / ()

[2]
From: Cathy Mc < birdlady@bdol.com>

Excuse me for putting my 2¢ in here, but has anyone cross-referenced
the daytime temperatures with the incidence of the death of these
crows? I'd also suspect the unusually warm weather we had in this
area. The mosquitoes could have become active in that time. We did
have temps that reached about 60° on some days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
WESTNILEVIRUS-L is an email discussion group for communication
and discussion about West Nile Virus, particularly regarding policy,
risk reduction and public education issues. It is hosted at Cornell
University and moderated by Dr. Lois Levitan, Program Leader of
Cornell's Environmental Risk Analysis Program (ERAP).

Subscribers are encouraged to post to the group by sending
messages to <envrisk@cornell.edu>. Put "WNV Listserv" in
the subject line and send unformatted text, without attachments.

To subscribe (or unsubscribe), please send an email request with
  your name and contact information to <envrisk@cornell.edu>.
To receive messages once a day in digest format, subscribers should
send an email to <listproc@cornell.edu> with message:
"set WESTNILEVIRUS-L mail digest-nomime".

Postings are archived at
<http://environmentalrisk.cornell.edu/WNV/WNV-LArchive>.
Received on Tue Feb 22 08:55:07 2005