Late in the summer of 1999, Dr. Deborah Asnis had three patients in Flushing Hospital in New York who had similar, dire symptoms and were not responding to treatment.
The patients had three things in common: all were from the same part of Queens, were 60 or older, and had dark tans. It was that last clue that eventually unlocked the mystery, leading to the diagnosis of the first known West Nile virus cases in the country.
It was the kind of situation that Asnis, chief of infectious diseases at the hospital, had trained for.
“I found infectious diseases to be fascinating,” she said in a 1999 New York Daily News interview.