West Nile Virus has killed 15 people in northern Greece and sickened 158 others, the Hellenic Centre for Disease Control and Prevention reported Friday.
Thirty-nine people were hospitalized Friday, nine of them in intensive care, the agency said. Another 116 patients have been treated and discharged from the hospital.
West Nile Virus is usually transmitted by infected mosquitoes or blood transfusions. Severe symptoms can include high fever, headache, neck stiffness, stupor, disorientation, coma, tremors, convulsions, muscle weakness, vision loss, numbness and paralysis.
About 80 percent of people infected with the virus show no symptoms, health officials say.
Authorities in central Macedonia, in northern Greece where most cases have been reported, said they would step up spraying programs in an attempt to ward off mosquitoes.
Authorities also said they are taking steps to prevent transmission by blood transfusions. Read all post…
Eating like a medieval peasant could bring health benefits A lecturer in medieval history believes that eating more like the peasants of that period would help control obesity today. Dr Iona McCleery, who lectures at Leeds University, and her team will be visiting schools in the Wakefield area of Yorkshire to talk about diet. “We will use history to develop a less preachy approach to modern health,” BBC News quoted her as saying “We’ll be asking questions such as ‘how do our relatively low activity levels interact with our diet in contrast to soldiers and labourers of past times’?” She said that in the past the wealthier people were most likely to be overweight, but today it is those with less money who are more likely to be obese. The