Pearse FitzPatrick, 68, had been sick for a few days with fever and nausea. But when he got up in the middle of the night, it really hit him. "I kind of just dropped to the floor and couldn't get up," the James Island man said.
That his ailment would turn out to be an infection from a tiny mosquito was just as baffling. "Never even considered it," FitzPatrick said. He was one of two confirmed West Nile virus cases at Roper Hospital recently in Charleston.
Overall, South Carolina has had nine human cases so far in 2024, which is right around the pace the state saw in 2023, said Dr. Martha Buchanan, interim director of the Bureau of Communicable Disease Prevention and Control for the Department of Public Health. "The truth is, it's West Nile season, and the mosquitoes are very active right now," she said.
In addition to the two cases in the Lowcountry, there have been four in the Midlands, two in the Upstate and one in the Pee Dee region, officials reported. The state does not release data by county in order to help protect patient privacy. Charleston has 2 West Nile virus cases as mosquito-borne disease spreads West Nile virus was first identified in Uganda in 1937, but it wasn't until the late '50s and early '60s that it was found to cause serious infections to the central nervous system and brain.
It was first diagnosed in the U.S. in 1999 in patients in New York City, but it quickly spread outward after that.
South Carolina saw its first human case of serious disease in 200.