In New York state, health officials have confirmed 50 cases of the virus, five people have died from it and another 166 cases are under investigation. Public health officials are on an intense hunt in Queens, N.Y., which is ground zero for the outbreak. They are struggling to figure out how a virus from a remote region half a world away made its way to the New York City borough.

MANY QUESTIONS UNANSWERED
Scientists know mosquitoes infect people and birds carry the virus. But there are many unanswered questions — including how far the virus has spread beyond New York City.
 
“Where did this virus come from? Did it arrive in a person? Did it arrive in a bird? Did it arrive in a mosquito? We will try to get to the bottom of that,” said Hughes. To find answers, workers sent samples to a Colorado lab charged with tracking hundreds of diseases that insects transmit in the United States and around the world.
 
Many scientists are not surprised by the new infectious agent. “Every year, two or three new agents appear in very odd places. I think the scientific community was expecting something to appear. It wasn’t clear what,” said Dr. Barry Bloom, dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health.
 
Why was it expected? Because disease-causing organisms can move so easily around the world. It is part of a new intermingling of the entire earth’s ecosystem that can have disastrous consequences.
 
GLOBAL DISEASE THREAT
Every year, 27 million Americans visit developing countries and almost 190,000 flights land in New York City alone.
“We are increasingly seeing, with changes in habitat and changes in travel, that pathogens that we don’t typically think of as being infectious on our shores are indeed here and this really changes the way we have to do clinical medicine,” said Dr. Ian Lipkin of the University of California in Irvine.
 
The worst case so far: AIDS. Unknown 19 years ago, there are now a million people infected in the United States — and 40 million worldwide. Scientists know other new diseases will strike. Could one be that deadly again? “We don’t know how bad it will be. We know that there will be loss of life and enormous economic problems unless we are better prepared than we are,” said Bloom.
 
Many see the outbreak that started in Queens as the latest wake-up call for the need to understand the global disease threat that faces us all.