By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

It comes up every summer, that pesty green quandary: Should you use strong chemicals like DEET to fend off the mosquitoes and ticks that can transmit the insidious Lyme Disease and the potentially deadly West Nile Virus?

We want to use less toxic protection, formulas that are based on natural ingredients or at least those that haven’t been shown to cause neurological damage (albeit in rare cases). Ironically, using DEET (N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide) to protect against West Nile forces you to choose between potential rare neurological side effects. Will you overreact to DEET or be the unlucky one whose case of West Nile runs amok, producing neurological manifestations? Which raises the question — what are the odds?

Turns out you are more likely to get a severe case of West Nile than you are to have a bad reaction to DEET (and you can control that possibility with careful application). The Centers for Disease Control reports that there were 44 fatalities caused by West Nile in the US in 2008 from among the 687 cases in which the virus mushroomed into encephalitis or meningitis (meaning it induced swelling in the brain or spinal cord.)

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