Early West Nile Virus activity in the United States may point to a once-in-a-decade spike infections. Here’s what survivors want you to know.

CNN — Brittany Yeager was leading a troop of girls at Girl Scout camp in Idaho last summer when a mosquito bite upended her life. “There wasn’t the story of what happened to me.” Yeager, Brittingham and Hamrick are three of the roughly 1,000 Americans who are hospitalized each year with the most severe form of West Nile virus, in which the infection invades the brain and nervous system. If that percentage were applied to the entire population of Hillsborough County, Florida, “that’s almost a quarter of a million people who have been bitten by an infected mosquito and infected.” This year, West Nile activity has picked up earlier than usual–the heaviest activity is typically seen in August and September– and experts are worried that could mean a blockbuster year for the virus. “So kind of like what you see with long Covid, we’ve seen that with West Nile as well, where you can get this ‘long West Nile’ kind of picture.” Watching West Nile patients struggle to recover from their infections made Murray wonder what would become of survivors over time. “Over that time period, we saw progression of neurologic disease – not improvement – even in people who had these milder West Nile fever cases,” she said.