Zack vs. mosquitoes; Zack wins

Zack Perkins had always been an active kid.

“I spent a lot of time telling him, ‘Would you just sit down and be quiet for five minutes?’” said his mother, Lori Perkins. “He literally bounced off the walls. He was always doing something. He was always busy.”

So when the teenager took to his bed about the time school started in 2013, it attracted attention.

“My child hated school, and so for the longest time I wondered if he just did not want to go to school,” Lori said. “He went from being busy to laying on the couch and I was asking, ‘Can’t you just get up and do something?’

“I would try to get him up and he would sit up and tears would roll down his face because he hurt so bad.”

He went to classes at Melrose High School for a few weeks that fall, but was so listless his mother began dragging him to local clinics, emergency rooms and doctors’ offices. Zack said he remembers giving 10 vials of blood. “They tested me for everything but the kitchen sink,” he said. “None of them came back positive.”

Finally, a family friend attending nursing classes suggested testing for the West Nile Virus.

Mosquitoes 1, Zack 0.

Like many West Nile victims, Zack, now 18, said he had no idea when he may have contracted the disease that left him with constant headaches and joint pain so severe some days he could not walk out of his house.

Tyler Belcher knows the feeling. He said he became a West Nile victim about a year before Zack. The Melrose school board member had to be hospitalized for most of a week.

“It was a horrible, horrible headache, I had neck pain, back pain. It was unbearable, with a very high fever,” Belcher said.

Relief was limited, with over-the-counter pain pills, and with time.

Like Zack, Belcher said he was outside a lot, but he has no memory of a particularly annoying mosquito bite, the most common way people are infected with West Nile. And like Zack, he said symptoms continued for the better part of a year.

The New Mexico Department of Health does not release information about specific West Nile victims, but Lori Perkins said at least four Melrose-area residents have suffered from West Nile in recent years. All recovered except for an elderly woman who also had cancer and pneumonia.

Since 2003, NMDH statistics show, 78 cases of West Nile Virus have been confirmed in Curry, De Baca, Quay and Roosevelt counties.

This is important to know because this is the beginning of mosquito season and health department officials are warning this summer could be a particularly bad year for the pesky insects.

NMDH spokesman David Morgan offered a few suggestions for avoiding West Nile:

• Use insect repellent with DEET.

• Wear long sleeves, long pants and socks outdoors, especially at dawn and dusk, when mosquitoes are most active.

There is no cure for West Nile and there is no vaccine to protect against it.

But there is good news: It’s not contagious and most victims are able to recover and carry on with their lives.

Take the case of Zack Perkins, for example. He was unable to attend classes most of his freshman year, but is expected to graduate Melrose High School on time in ceremonies slated for Saturday. After qualifying for the state track meet as an eighth grader, the mosquitoes played a large role in limiting his athletic activities the next three years. But this month, he helped Melrose High win the Class 1A state track championship.

Zack ran on four relay teams, including three that scored gold.

See you later, West Nile.

David Stevens is editor for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at: [email protected]