West Nile Virus
Regardless of what caused the solar wind interruption, it could be useful to determine whether or not the two-day cessation could have permitted Venusian particles to jaywalk, so to speak, to Earth, as depicted in diagram (B).
Solar wind reduction allows jaywalker event?
The present delivery mechanism under consideration is that Venus, as an electrically charged sphere, accelerated charged microscopic particles (including microbes) in its upper atmosphere, sufficiently for them to make the roughly 100 million mile journey to Earth before the solar wind disk re-occupied its normal location . For this transfer to work, as stated, the viral particles would have to be traveling away from Venus at approximately twice the average speed of the typical solar wind.
The hypothetically northward-moving solar wind disk, shown in vertical cross-section in the drawing, is schematic and is not to scale. Its position with respect to the ecliptic (which is being used here as an approximate reference frame) corresponds to conditions on late May 10th. (The cross-section is in line with the Sun and Venus.) The drawing does not show Venus in its position above the ecliptic, as it was at the time. )
Any jaywalking Venus viruses that reached Earth's upper atmosphere on around May 13, 1999 could conceivably have been doing their thing, i.e., initial outbreaks, in the time frame of June 13 to July 13. That's using the one to two months window mentioned above. The first reported cases of crows with nervous disorders (birds usually get it first) occurred in mid-June.
Diagram (C) shows the normal hypothetical delivery geometry for Venusian particles to Earth. (In this case the August 22, 1999 Venus inferior conjunction is being shown.)
Normal Venus-to-Earth Delivery System
The normal one-month minimum-delay, between Venus inferior conjunctions and associated disease outbreaks, (associated hypothetically at this point) may have to be decreased to about two weeks. (In the spring of 2001 an odd gastrointestinal flu-like illnesses hit Northeast Mississippi two weeks following the 30 March Venus inferior conjunction. (Needed: Reports on similar outbreaks from other areas, same time frame. Busy airports, with lots of combustion products drifting to the surface, may be prime locales for this suspected "drop-in" problem.) See the Open Plea to readers, physicians and epidemiologists near the top of the page Global Developments: Spring-Summer 2001.)
Smaller sized viruses (the 21-31 nanometer diameters of WNV for example) may make the Venus-to-Earth trip and/or Earth's atmospheric penetration faster than do larger viruses. The well established onset dates of the influenza pandemics, in the twentieth century, followed Venus inferior conjunctions by 28, 40 and 61 days, respectively. (See: Sunspot Activity, Venus Inferior Conjunctions, and Biological Events. Barber's six confirmed bacterial invasions (See main article.) occurred on an average of 55 days following Venus inferior conjunctions when accompanied by strong geomagnetic storms.
The extended Venusian atmosphere (blown by the solar wind but invisible at optical wavelengths) should be conically shaped (comet-like) rather than in a pencil beam. (A superposition of solar wind velocity and the radial speeds of particles departing the Venusian neighborhood. is postulated.) With that in mind, it is predicted that the most radially dispersive Venusian particulate matter will, in many cases, reach Earth's upper atmosphere a few days to a week or so prior to inferior conjunction, depending on solar wind speed and the net electrical charge on Venus. (We may be observing a kind of interplanetary electrophoresis, with the May 10-12, 1999 event being at one end of the spectrum. Particle charge-to-mass ratio, during the Venus electrical acceleration phase, will be an important factor. More to follow.)
The revised (two weeks to two months) window for Venusian viral deliveries, for the August 22, 1999 inferior conjunction would thus have been 6 Sep - 21 Oct 1999.
There was a wave of human West Nile virus cases in the United States in the late-July to October 1999 time frame. (Those that made it to the news media were in Conneticut, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey.) Two of these reports were erroneously listed on this web site's Global Developments Spring-Summer 2001- Part 2 page, in a 20 July 2001 entry, as being the first occurrences of WNV in the United States. This writer was not aware of the mid-summer 1999 cases until 2002.)
See the USDA Summary of West Nile Virus in the United States, 1999. Note that the mid-June and 29 June New York bird cases are not included in this summary.
10 December 1999 - India
There was an outbreak of Japanese encephalitis which started in early
September in Andhra Pradesh state. (Japanese encephalitis is endemic to
Andhra Pradesh where outbreaks occur every 2 to 3 years.) The last
outbreak was in 1997. Source: World Heath Organization -
Communicable Disease Surveillance and Response (CSR)
[Link used to be:
http://www.who.int/disease-outbreak-news/n1999/dec/10dec1999.html]
A search is underway to see whether or not other sporadic cases of avian, equine, or human viral encephalitis, of unknown origin, occurred across the rest of the United States, or around the globe, in the 6 Sep- 21 Oct 1999 time frame. [That search did not occur. RSF - 19 Jan 2007.]
Reader inputs (references to News articles, etc. regarding encephalitis cases in the stated time frame) are solicited.
The accompanying spreadsheet shows that the initial four cases of West Nile Virus in 2001 in the United States occurred in the 30 to 60 day period following the Venus inferior conjunction which took place on 30 March 2001. Data shown is from USGS - Center for Integration of Natural Disaster Information (CINDI).
Bird cases of WNV, by week in 2001, for Maryland and New York (CINDI info) are available at www.riverdeep.net. Notice the month of May cases which occurred in the 2 weeks to 2 months window following the March 30, 2001 Venus inferior conjunction.
