Arcadian dream spoiler?

“Et in arcadia ego” was, in days gone by, the cry of young men in search of a good time. Pleasures abounded for those on the Grand Tour, from the banal and bacchanalian in fine wines or smelly cheese,  to the character building and cultural heights of the imperial roots of Western civilisation. High throughput mass travel now gives a dangerously large number of international visitors easy access to what were once the preserve of a privileged few. France and Italy are among the most visited of all countries; Tuscany being among the most popular of all tourist destinations. Hardly surprising when it is so packed with jaw-droppingly beautiful scenery, ancient history history and first class cuisine.

So, when people right at the heart of this tourist magnet sound a warning about an emerging infectious disease, you can imagine some locals getting a little nervous about the health and well-being of the goose that lays the golden eggs. The problem, it appears, is the emergence of an arbovirus in the bunyavirus family which has been named Toscanavirus (TOSV). It is transmitted by Phlebotomus and other species of sandfly in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and other parts of the Mediterranean rim. The infection appears to be neurotropic, causing meningitis, encephalitis but also an influenza-like illness and asymptomatic infection. First described in 1971, it is commoner in the summer months when the sandflies are present in higher numbers. While it may be one of the commoner causes of aseptic meningitis in parts of Italy, it doesn’t appear to have kept the tourists away. Cases of imported infection have been reported from various parts of northern Europe where the cooler weather is less favorable to phlebotomine sandflies.

Toscanavirus and the consequences of its infection are reviewed in a recent article in the Open Journal of Virology.

Toscana Virus Epidemiology: From Italy to Beyond. Maria G. Cusi, Gianni G. Savellini and Giacomo Zanelli. The Open Virology Journal, 2010; 4: 22-28.

Ominously, Siena where the authors of this paper are based is a city of outstanding architectural and cultural beauty that owes its preservation of its medieval heritage to the catastrophic consequences of the Black Death – an emerging infectious disease with an impact so great that it took centuries before any single infection would have a greater social impact.