West Nile virus infection in humans and other vertebrates

Abstract

The West Nile virus is an arthropod borne or ARBO virus from the Flaviviridae family, which is maintained in nature in the transmission cycle between hosting birds and ornithophilic mosquito vectors. The virus is capable of infecting different vertebrate species and 60 mosquito species. The infection in humans can be asymptomatic or it can have different clinical manifestations ranging from light febrile diseases to fatal meningoencephalitis. This paper presents recent findings on the activity of the West Nile virus in Europe, the USA and Serbia. Presented are the results of serological testing of human populations and animals in Serbia, and the methods of molecular diagnostics to prove the existence of the virus. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. TR31084 i br. TR43007]

West Nile virus surveillance in mosquitoes, April to October 2013, Vojvodina province, Serbia: implications for the 2014 season

“…WNV has been documented in Serbia since the 1970s by seroepidemiological surveys and was detected in Culex pipiens mosquitoes during a mosquito surveillance programme conducted in 2010 [1,2]. After the 2012 epidemic, which was associated with WNV lineage 2 and caused 58 human cases in Serbia (eight of them fatal), the virus was successfully detected and characterised in migratory bird samples [3].…”