When Bill Saville, DVM, PhD, Dipl. ACVIM, was asked to form the Ohio West Nile Virus (WNV) Working Group in late 1999, the disease was still a distant concern in New York City where health officials had identified the first North American case of the virus in a dead crow in August 1999. By December 2000, the health problem was literally on Ohio’s doorstep when the virus was detected across the state line in Erie County, Pa.   

“I went to an international WNV meeting in New York, and the director of the Centers for Disease Control’s Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases division in Fort Collins, Colo., said, ‘Look out Ohio, it’s coming your way,'” recalls Saville, a veterinary epidemiologist and extension veterinarian at Ohio State University’s Veterinary Preventive Medicine department