By Brian Lockhart
Last summer's outbreak of the West Nile virus in the city was documented in an often melodramatic half-hour program on the Discovery Channel Friday evening, which revealed that state health officials and the Federal Bureau of Investigation seriously considered the possibility that the outbreak was the work of bio-terrorism.
While one city health facility praised the show, which outlined how doctors from a variety of health agencies gradually diagnosed the virus, a local pesticide activist said it glossed over the potential dangers of the chemicals sprayed throughout the city to kill virus-carrying mosquitoes.
Michael Hinck, a spokesman for Flushing Hospital, whose staff member, Dr. Debra Asnis, was prominently featured in the show, said officials there were pleased with the program.
“Dr. Asnis did a lot of good by notifying the proper people and having the virus identified before it got a lot worse,” Hinck said, noting the Learning Channel was at work on a similar West Nile virus program.
John Gadd, a spokesman for the city Health Department, said the department also cooperated with the Discovery Channel in putting the show together, but noted “we haven't had the opportunity to watch it at this point.”
“I think it was horrible,” said Bay Terrace activist Joyce Shepard, a vocal critic of the city's use of pesticides. She said the documentary was “scary” and did not focus on the adverse health effects the pesticides reportedly had on some New Yorkers.
“I'll tell you the truth. After I saw it, I thought to myself 'Gee, maybe they should spray more,'” Shepard said.
The show's use of melodramatic visual effects included several shots of bustling city streets intercut with and at other times superimposed beneath, closeups of mosquitoes. The final shot was a re-enactment of the heart rate on a heart monitor of a bedridden elderly patient as it spikes, then goes flat, signaling his death from the virus.
A representative from the Discovery Channel could not be reached for comment by press time.
The program began with a re-enactment of an Aug. 15 ambulance run to Flushing Hospital. The patient was an 80-year-old man suffering from a 105 degree fever, cardiac arrest and severe muscle weakness.
He was the second patient whom Asnis had seen with those symptoms in three days, said the narrator.
According to the show, Asnis first suspected her patients had botulism, then a form of encephalitis. By the time two doctors from the city Health Department – Marci Layton and Annie Fine – were called to Flushing Hospital around Aug. 20 to assist in the investigation, Asnis had five mysterious cases on her hands.
The doctors said they looked for similarities among the patients, all of whom were between 58 and 87 years old and lived in the same neighborhood in College Point/Whitestone.
“There was nothing that really struck us except they all reported spending time outdoors in the evening hours,” Layton said, as she explained how mosquitoes were discovered as the carriers, which led a doctor with the state Health Department to diagnose the illness as St. Louis Encephalitis.
It was after a conference call with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease control revealed a case of the virus miles away from northeast Queens, near Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, that health officials realized the virus was not being contained and decided to spray all five boroughs, said the narrator.
“Because some of these living hypodermic needles can travel up to 20 miles in a single evening, the outbreak could quickly spread throughout the entire New York metropolitan area” and the city had to act quickly, said the narrator. “The hot zone is doused with malathion, a powerful insecticide, by air and land.”
The narrator noted that “experts believe that stopping the outbreak is critical and outweighs any potential danger of spraying an urban area with this potent insecticide.”
As Shepard pointed out, the show did not delve into the resulting controversy that the spraying made several residents severely ill and has been questioned for months by politicians, physicians and activists.
The show then explored how an investigation by both the state and the Bronx Zoo into the mysterious deaths of hundreds of crows and of some captive exotic birds led to the reclassification of the health emergency as the first-ever recorded outbreak of West Nile virus in the Western Hemisphere.
The documentary examined how the virus could have entered the country through an infected traveler, an infected bird or bio-terrorism.
“This outbreak had several characteristics which certainly made us consider the possibility” of bio-terrorism, said Fine, who noted the FBI had considered the possibility because Iraq was rumored to be interested in using it as a weapon.
The documentary, however, said health officials concluded there was no evidence of bio-terrorism.
Seven deaths and 61 possible human cases later, the documentary said health experts were gearing up for the spring and the re-emergence of the mosquitoes.
“Was this outbreak a minor outbreak in 1999 to be followed in the year 2000 by a massive outbreak up and down the East Coast with tens of thousands of human cases and all kinds of other problems?” said Dr. Mike Turell, a research entomologist interviewed on the program. “Or will this virus just disappear this winter?”
“We will not know until the spring,” he said. “But we're gonna be looking for it.”
