Where it all started<\/p>\n
The whole story begins a week earlier. The virus was first detected on August 17 in a blood donor from Utrecht who hadn\u2019t traveled abroad recently, meaning the infection happened at home. It was the first human infection on Dutch soil since 2020, when a small cluster was recorded around Utrecht and Arnhem.<\/p>\n
Since then, the virus has been confirmed in three provinces, Utrecht, North Brabant, and South Holland, found in horses, mosquitoes, and birds. The institute has asked doctors across the country to watch for symptoms of West Nile fever in their patients.<\/p>\n
How big is the risk, really?<\/p>\n
For most people, minimal. About 80 percent of those infected have no symptoms at all and never find out they had it. Around 19 percent get something flu-like: fever, fatigue, headache. Only about 1 percent develop a more serious form, encephalitis or another neurological complication, and that\u2019s where the risk of death becomes real.<\/p>\n
The institute states explicitly that \u201cthe risk of infection in the Netherlands remains low.\u201d And that holds, regardless of this case. The virus doesn\u2019t pass from person to person. A human is what epidemiologists call a dead-end host for the virus, even a severely ill person doesn\u2019t carry enough of it in their blood to infect a mosquito that bites them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Where it all started The whole story begins a week earlier. The virus was first detected on August…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[536,26137,6,7475,20306],"class_list":["post-40711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-netherlands","tag-health","tag-mosquitoes","tag-netherlands","tag-virus","tag-west-nile-virus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}