Greece Second in Europe for West Nile, Seven Dead in Skopje

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) has recorded at least 1,086 confirmed cases of West Nile fever across 15 European countries as of September 3. The figure matters directly for Serbian travelers, since the transmission season is still underway and Greece, the country with the second highest case count on the continent, remains a destination Serbians keep flocking to well into September.

According to the ECDC report, Italy leads with 516 cases, followed by Greece with 284 and Spain with 88. The numbers have jumped sharply in just a few weeks: in early August, just over 240 cases had been reported across seven European countries, and a month later the tally has passed a thousand across twice as many countries. The virus, the ECDC notes, spreads through mosquitoes that pick it up from infected wild birds.

Neighboring North Macedonia, whose weekly epidemiological bulletins regularly feed into the regional picture of mosquito-borne disease, has now reported its first deaths of the year. The country’s Institute of Public Health said in its weekly epidemiological report that 56 infections had been registered as of September 1, of which seven were fatal. The institute gave only the nationwide death toll, without specifying which city the patients fell ill or were treated in.

Of the 56 registered cases, 52 are classified as confirmed and four as probable. By location of infection, 54 cases originate in Skopje, with one each recorded in Veles and Kumanovo. That breakdown, however, shows only where people were infected, not where the seven who died lost their lives, a detail the institute did not release.

“Fifty-five cases are autochthonous, and one case involves travel history to Greece, though the incubation period also covers time spent in Macedonia,” the Institute of Public Health of North Macedonia said in its report.

With that single exception, the institute is effectively ruling out an imported outbreak, treating the epidemic as domestically transmitted by mosquitoes on its own territory.

Among those infected, 44 are men and 12 are women, with an average age of 65.8, confirming that the virus hits older people hardest. North Macedonia’s first case of the year was recorded on May 12, when a patient first showed symptoms, meaning the outbreak has now run for nearly four months.

According to Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, about 20 percent of infected people develop flu-like symptoms, while a more severe form of the disease, which can include inflammation of the brain or its membranes, occurs in roughly one percent of cases. Older people and those with weakened immune systems are most at risk, a pattern that matches the average age of those infected in North Macedonia.

For Serbia, this kind of weekly snapshot is a useful gauge of how serious the season is in the surrounding region, since the virus appears every year and domestic institutions track cases on their own territory as well. The fact that North Macedonia, a country of fewer than two million people, has reported seven deaths in just over three months shows how fast an outbreak can develop once temperatures and mosquito numbers stay high late into summer. Likewise, the figure of 284 cases in Greece is not just a statistic for Greek officials, it is a number anyone spending their summer vacation there should be watching too.

The ECDC updates its overview every week, and North Macedonia’s Institute of Public Health does the same with its own report. The next figures, due in the coming days, will show whether the regional outbreak is slowing as nights grow cooler or, as in previous weeks, continuing to spread.