Mosquito-borne West Nile virus is causing a medical condition rarely seen by US physicians since the 1950s: polio. In case reports released yesterday, stunned neurologists in Mississippi and Georgia describe the conditions of four patients suffering from the hobbled limbs, impaired breathing, and fevers that are the hallmark of polio, a disease essentially eradicated in the United States.
Just like the polio patients of the first half of the 20th century, the West Nile victims seen this summer by the Southern doctors are also enduring prolonged muscle weakness and respiratory ailments that will require months of treatment and probably will disable some of the patients permanently.
''I teach this as a historical thing to the residents,'' said Dr. Jonathan D. Glass, director of the neuromuscular program at Emory University in Atlanta and one of the physicians who treated the polio patients. ...
