Report of Clinical Case of West Nile Virus Infection Probably Acquired in the Laboratory

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Abstract
This report describes an infection by West Nile virus in a technician who was working with the virus in the laboratory. Evidence favors the view that the infection was acquired in the laboratory. We have found no record of a similar case in the literature. The West Nile virus was first isolated in 1937 from the blood of a febrile woman in the West Nile province of Uganda (Smithburn et al., 1940). It was again isolated in 1950 in an Egyptian village north of Cairo (Melnick et al., 1951). The virus when inoculated intracerebrally into Swiss mice produces an encephalitis and is highly fatal. Southam and Moore (1952) in a study of the effect of the virus on neoplasms, experimentally infected 68 humans with a strain of West Nile virus (Egypt 101). Four patients developed definite signs of diffuse encephalitis and two patients showed transient signs of encephalitis.