'It's the new polio'

West Nile Virus has caused more serious health problems here and around the nation than the flu-like symptoms experts had expected, "especially among an alarming number of healthy, young and middle-age adults," the Daily News' Troy Anderson reports. Los Angeles County has had about 300 cases this mosquito season, with eight deaths. It's the "neuroinvasive" impacts that have doctors concerned. Here, 73 patients got meningitis, 39 got encephalitis and four became paralyzed.

"It's the new polio," said James J. Rahal, a professor at the Cornell University Weill College of Medicine in New York. "It's a devastating complication."

The local cases have been most numerous in the San Gabriel Valley.