Dr. Davis is one of San Francisco's finest house call specialist physicians and has been providing house calls and office visits to the Bay Area since 2005. His practice is built upon the philosophy that excellent customer service and excellent patient care go together. Dr. Davis works out of a charming 100-year-old Victorian home, and he believes that healing should begin when you walk in the door. While trained in modern medicine, Dr. Davis also has a deep appreciation of cultural anthropology, the natural sciences, and philosophy all of which he integrates with his medical practice. Dr. Davis received his MD from the University of Florida and completed his Family Practice residency at Lehigh Valley Family Practice. He has also lived, studied, and traveled abroad extensively, including for one year in Beijing, China, where he studied and practiced the principles of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture.
JUSTIN C.K. DAVIS, MD: Hi, I'm Dr. Justin Davis and today, I'm going to speak to you about West Nile virus. The West Nile virus is a virus that's transmitted to people and certain animals by infected mosquitoes. West Nile virus is primarily found throughout places in Africa, The Middle East, and parts of Western Asia, but has now made an appearance in the United States and is actually found throughout the continental United States. West Nile virus still remains a fairly rare occurrence in the United States although it's increasing in prevalence and if you are infected, the symptoms are the following: About 80% of people that are infected actually will have no symptoms at all and is a very mild disease hardly affecting them. Twenty percent of people that will be infected will have mild symptoms such fever, fatigue, a rash, generalized symptoms that are hard to define, fairly mild, and will resolve spontaneously. But what we hear the most about is the unfortunate few, less than 1% of people who get infected who develop much more serious symptoms and these symptoms are called encephalitis, when the virus enters into the brain and the brain becomes infected and swollen. When this happens, symptoms can be quite severe causing neurologic symptoms, coma, and sometimes leading to death. Before you panic, it's again a very unusual virus and even the people that are infected, only 1% will have an encephalitis. And of those people who have encephalitis, very few those will have permanent damage, although some will. Now treatment is really aimed more at controlling the symptoms when you have the encephalitis and hoping that it resolves, so giving medicine to help with any pain to stabilize the person and help take away brain swelling. Therefore, prevention is really based on trying to limit the amount of infected mosquitoes that are around or trying to stop yourself from being bitten. So a few common sense things can really prevent a lot of future complications. Those are if you know that it's a time when a lot of mosquitoes are out like dusk or dawn, make sure to cover up properly, stay indoors or at least wear some kind of mosquito repellent, preferably one with DEET and this will help to prevent you getting bitten by a mosquito. Other things you can do to help prevent transmission of disease and overpopulation of mosquitoes are mosquitoes need water to breathe, so any stagnant or old water such as an old flower pots for example, check this regularly and dump them out and this will help to prevent the transmission of the disease. The last thing to keep in mind is that many of the symptoms that you may have from a mild encephalitis are really very generalized and maybe seen with lots of diseases. So don't panic, but it's a good idea to alert your physician and of course, if you have any more serious neurologic complication, let a physician or emergency medical personnel know immediately.
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