One of these days, it will warm up for a good, long time — and we’ll be worried about bugs.
Dr.Samuel Dorevitch, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told a recent National Conference of State Legislatures gathering in Springfield that the Asian tiger mosquito has made a home in Peoria. The bug arrived in a shipment of used tires from China in 1985 and now is blamed for West Nile virus and encephalitis.
Dorevitch says it’s an example of how illness can be introduced to a new country — or continent — simply hitching a ride. He said the painful Chikungunya virus had not been reported in Europe until 2007, when a traveler from India to Italy brought it.