Over the past two months, officials from the Department of Health collected blood samples from 371 Vermonters in the towns of Brandon, Sudbury and Whiting.
The samples are part of a study to identify whether people in those towns have contracted Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) without dying. A man from Sudbury and another from Brandon, who died from EEE last fall, catalyzed the study, which is being conducted in conjunction with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
“We don’t know a lot about the Eastern equine encephalitis virus, and how often people get infected and are asymptomatic or have a mild illness but are never diagnosed with EEE,” said Patsy Kelso, a state epidemiologist. “So, what this study is doing is looking for (EEE) antibodies in the blood of people who live in the three towns where we saw activity last year, to see if people were infected at some point in the past.”
Kelso suspects that samples will turn up positive for EEE, but it might be a year until the state finds out. Kelso said the CDC laboratory that will analyze the specimens is busy as West Nile virus season rolls into view.
A similar experiment hasn’t been conducted since 1969. Kelso said that similar tests are being carried out in Maine and western New York, where EEE activity has been prominent in recent years.
