The new polio?

摘要

Charlie gibbs never knew what hit him. The 56-year-old insurance claims adjuster didn't notice when a mosquito took a drink of his blood one day last summer, but the event turned his world upside down. "I used to walk two miles a day. I played golf. I liked to work in the garden," he recalls. These days Gibbs, who lives in Clinton, Mississippi, uses a walking frame, grateful that he can walk at all. Only nine months ago his legs and arms were completely paralysed. And for the first month he was ill, he couldn't even recognise Kathy, his wife of 33 years. While his frightened family stood by, doctors struggled for two-and-a-half weeks to figure out what catastrophe had befallen him. Was it a stroke? Or the mysterious Guillain-Barre syndrome, an inflammation of the nervous system that can cause sudden paralysis? But both brain and body scans checked out fine. Then the results of nerve conduction tests made everyone sit up and take notice - including researchers at the CDC, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Neurons called anterior horn cells in Gibbs's spinal column showed severe damage, clear evidence of poliomyelitis. Except that Gibbs didn't have poliovirus. No one has had it in the US for years. Instead, he had West Nile virus.