Cibola County horse dies from West Nile

By Jim Tiffin
Cibola County Bureau

GRANTS — Three, possibly four horses have died this year from the West Nile virus, including one in Cibola County, state health officials said Thursday afternoon.

Pam Reynolds, an environmental scientist with the New Mexico Department of Health, said a horse on Mount Taylor was seen by veterinarians, and tested positive for the virus on Sept. 4.

Since then, the horse was euthanized, but Reynolds did not know what date, since the veterinarians have gone on vacation and will not return until next week.

The horse was in another location, out of the county, just before going down with the virus, so health officials suspect the virus was contracted elsewhere and returned to Cibola County with the horse.

Jimmy Chavez, director of public works for Cibola County, said mosquitoes do not usually travel up Mount Taylor, supporting the health department’s suspicions about the horse contracting the virus elsewhere.

So far this year, there have been 12 horses that have contracted the virus statewide, said Dr. Paul Ettestad, DVM, a state veterinarian in Santa Fe.

Reynolds said usually between one-quarter to one-third of the horses that contract the virus die.

The health department does not have an exact number of horses that have died statewide from the 12 that have contracted the virus, since veterinarians do not always inform the department when they euthanize a horse, she said.

There have been no human West Nile virus cases in Cibola County this year.

The West Nile season usually starts winding down and vector control agents in the county see less mosquitoes starting the first two weeks of September, but that has not happened this year.

“We’ve had so much rain, we have not seen less mosquitoes like we usually do,” Chavez said.

He said two hot spots continue to produce a large number of mosquitoes in Grants.

One of the hot spots is the eastern portion of the Rio San Jose near the mortuary. Last month a mosquito tested positive for the virus in the river behind the pancake restaurant on the eastern side of the city, but none since.

“We hit that area really hard with insecticides and infanticides and we’ve tested three times since we received the call from the state on Aug. 7, that the mosquito tested positive and none have tested positive since,” Chavez said.

The other hot spot is on the western side of apartments and homes along Sage Avenue, where overgrown weeds in the Rio San Jose and pools of standing water created by the frequent rain, are also creating large number of mosquitoes, Chavez said.

“When we get a hard frost, with temperatures below freezing, that should be the end of the mosquito population because it kills them,” Ettestad said.

Chavez said only female mosquitoes bite, because they need the blood for their eggs.

Some mosquitoes hibernate during the winter months however, and those are the ones who create the populations in the spring when freezing temperatures end and the weather becomes warmer, Chavez said.

So far this year about 2,000 mosquitoes have been sent to the state for West Nile virus testing, Chavez said, and only the one came back positive so far.

To contact reporter Jim Tiffin, call (505) 287-2197 or e-mail: jtiffin.independent@yahoo.com.