The US’s former longtime top public health official Anthony Fauci says his recent bout with West Nile virus “nearly took [him] down”.
In an opinion piece published Monday by the New York Times, Fauci explained how he likely contracted the virus – which spreads through mosquito bites – outside his home in Washington before he was hospitalized in August.
The 83-year-old physician said he realized something was wrong when he experienced weakness and exhaustion, though he initially chalked those symptoms up to lingering effects from having caught Covid-19 in July.
He wrote that he became “delirious and incoherent with a temperature of 103 degrees” and ultimately checked into a hospital for nearly six days. Fauci said his caretakers treated him for sepsis – a life-threatening complication to an infection – and then ran blood tests on him which revealed he had West Nile virus.
“After I spent more than 50 years chasing and fighting viruses, one fought back and nearly took me down,” Fauci added in his Times op-ed. “There is no treatment for West Nile virus disease, and I was left to deal with its toll on my body.”
The physical and mental exhaustion that the virus inflicted on Fauci was “terrifying”, he wrote.
“A very scary part of the ordeal was the effect on my cognition,” Fauci said. “I was disoriented, unable to remember certain words, asking questions of my family that I should have known answers to.
“I was afraid that I would never recover and return to normal.”
While some West Nile virus cases are deadly, Fauci managed to recover. He explained how his cognitive problems had resolved, and he has been walking multiple miles daily as of the beginning of October.
Yet Fauci said he opened up about his battle with the virus to raise awareness of “a disease that, for many people, can have devastating and permanent consequences”. He also called on communities to invest “considerably more resources … into addressing this threat now, not when the threat becomes an even greater crisis”.
Local governments’ most visible method of combating West Nile virus involves pickup trucks and planes that spray insecticide.
Beside death, West Nile virus – which has been detected in all but four US states this year – can also cause permanent neurological problems in people, he said.
Information from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that Fauci joined the roughly 1,000 Americans who are hospitalized with the virus each year. About 80% of those who are infected do not develop symptoms, though about one in five develop symptoms which include fever, body aches, rash and diarrhea.
Fauci served at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for 54 years beginning in 1968. He directed the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease from 1984 until his retirement in 2022 after achieving wide recognition for his public health communication role during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Since then, Fauci has been working as a distinguished professor at Georgetown University’s medical school.
