By William Murphy
Newsday
NASSAU COUNTY, NY — Nassau County has recorded its deadliest year from West Nile virus with the confirmation yesterday that a 90-year-old Mineola man also perished from the mosquito-borne illness.
He joins two other people in Nassau confirmed dead from the virus. Officials also announced another confirmed case — that of a 56-year-old woman — bringing the number of cases in Nassau so far this year to nine confirmed and three likely cases of infection.
The death of the man, whose identity has not been made public, was previously listed as under investigation by the county Department of Health.
In response to questions from Newsday, the county yesterday defended Wednesday night’s aerial spraying of the chemical Scourge across a broad swath of the county between the Long Island Expressway and the Southern State and from the Queens border to the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway. That area was found to have some of the heaviest concentrations of mosquitoes.
Health Commissioner Maria Torroella Carney described the aerial spraying as “a last resort,” necessary to protect public health.
Only one of every 150 suspected cases of West Nile infection becomes serious enough to lead to a diagnosis, so it is statistically probable that some 1,800 people in the county have contracted the disease, she said yesterday.
Carney and Public Works Commissioner Raymond Ribeiro said the county has set out fresh mosquito traps and will assess the situation again next week to decide whether more spraying to kill adult mosquitoes is necessary.
“The decision to spray ... is one that is not taken lightly,” Ribeiro said. “It depends on all of the data that’s collected with respect to the mosquito population, the number of human cases, the weather, the forecast.”
The decision on whether to spray again next week would depend on the evidence in the traps and other factors, he said. “You, in essence, start all over again, you take all the data, you review it and you make an informed decision based on all the latest information,” he said.
Carney said the decision to spray was made on Sept. 2 when data from the previous week showed an upward spike in mosquito activity that pushed the numbers past those of recent years.
She likened the use of spraying to giving medicine to a sick person. “You take it following the instructions and monitoring for side effects. This is very similar. We use caution. We give warnings to the public,” she said.
Officials explained yesterday why people with unlisted telephone numbers were not alerted about the spraying. Nassau has a list of telephone numbers from Verizon that the county’s enhanced 911 emergency telephone system dials. But that list can be used only in an emergency, said Gregory Caronia, deputy director of the Office of Emergency Management.
“We cannot, under our contract with Verizon, use the list unless it is for emergency services, meaning lights and sirens. Emergency response to me is police, fire, EMS,” Caronia said.
For nonemergency calls, such as advisories about aerial spraying, the county has to use another list compiled by a contractor, Swiftreach, which culls the numbers from publicly available sources, Caronia said.