Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Virus-infected ducks came from Strip hotel

The ducks that were found to be infected with West Nile virus came from the "water feature" of a hotel on the Strip, health officials acknowledge, but they won't say which hotel.

The Clark County Health District announced on Monday that those ducks and mosquitoes had been confirmed to be infected with virus, but as for exactly where the virus had been located, the district provided the public with only the zip codes in which the mallards and insects had been found.

Now health officials are saying that the ducks were taken from the grounds of a Strip hotel in late July. They said that when they say the ducks were in "a water feature," that description could mean a swimming pool, waterfall, pond, etc.

Anette Rink, the state's director of animal disease and food safety, said ducks are routinely reported invading the elaborate water features at many resorts. Once collected, they are tested for a litany of diseases, she said.

Rink confirmed that the ducks and the mosquitoes believed to have infected them were found on the Strip, but would not say where.

"That's my understanding (that they were found at a Strip resort) but I can't give an exact location," Rink said.

A permanent injunction issued in 2003 prevents the health district or U.S. Department of Agriculture from releasing any more about the resort other than its zip code, in this case one shared by most of the hotels, Glenn Savage, the health district's environmental health manager, said. The ruling stems from a 1997 Texas case regarding a non-profit animal rights group's requests for USDA records on the use of livestock protection collars at several ranches in the Lone Star state.

The ruling bars agencies from releasing any "unique identifying characteristic of the cooperators that allow the recipient to ascertain the specific identity of the cooperators."

Sharing the zip code can be beneficial for health officials trying to warn residents of the disease which is carried by mosquitoes, meaning it is rarely limited to just one area, Savage said.

"We don't want to give people a false sense of security that if they're not in those areas that there's not a problem," he said. What the public needs to know is that infected mosquitoes and birds "are being found in this county," Savage said.

The hotel in question had been cooperating with the USDA to monitor for potential breeding grounds for the disease, health district spokeswoman Jennifer Sizemore said. The federal agency then shares the information with the health district.

The illness can not be transferred from animal to human or from person to person, according to the Centers for Disease Control. It is spread only by mosquito bite.

Meanwhile, officials said Thursday that the wet weather expected to continue through the weekend will be the test of whether the Clark County Health District's new plan to keep West Nile virus out of Southern Nevada will float.

The health district, which assumed mosquito abatement duties from the county Public Works Department in May, has already seen an almost four-fold increase in reports of the kind of neglected pools and otherwise stagnant puddles that can become breeding grounds for the sometimes fatal disease,

Since Monday, after intermittent downpours that continued throughout the week turned much of the Valley into a kind of waterslide, the number of calls to the health district from concerned residents has spiked from about 10 to between 40 and 50 a day, Savage said.

"We thought that was going to happen," he said. "... You have water that's standing in low areas. I think the potential was there."

Those calls have led to about 1,200 complaints of potentially dangerous puddles, mosquito swarms and dead animals to inspectors scattered in satellite offices throughout the county, Savage said. The number is about the same as the combined total received by the health district and Public Works last year, he added.

Last year, 23 cases of the disease were reported in the county last year, but no deaths. Symptoms of West Nile, sometimes fatal in humans, include fever and headaches.

At least a couple of this year's complaints have already led to citations fo homeowners whose refusal to heed health district warnings to maintain their pools present a hazard to neighbors, Savage said. No such citations were issued last year, he added.

The citations often come with a court order for the homeowner or property manager to repay the health district for the taxpayer-shouldered cost of fixing the problem, he added.

"They're causing or allowing a public nuisance," Savage said. "We feel that the health district should not be responsible for paying for that."

Commissioners in May approved shifting the burden of watching for dangerous pools of water to the health district, saying that the agency is better equipped to prevent the spread of the disease by enforcing building codes governing the pools than Public Works's Vector Control program.

Under the arrangement, the vector control program will continue its efforts to control weeds and prevent the arrival of Africanized bees, public works spokesman Bobby Shelton said.

Vector control eats up about 75 percent of the county's $916,000 neighborhood services program. Most of the vector control budget would have gone toward mosquito abatement, Shelton said.

Now, Savage said, the health district can expect to see an additional $500,000 to help fight the spread of disease-carrying mosquitoes, much of which will go toward equipment and training for the 14 people whose jobs also include responding to reports of dead birds and mosquito swarms.

The money will also be used to send inspectors who perform "surveillance" on the flying insects to test for the disease in the far-flung counties that often make up the mosquitoes' migratory pattern, he said.

One of those rural communities, Lyon County, is already home to Nevada's only confirmed human case of the disease.

"We're trying to get ahead of things early on," Savage said. "If they're just north of us, it's only a matter of time."

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