Two adults in central North Carolina have died after contracting West Nile virus, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services announced, though the agency has not released where in the region the deaths occurred. The news adds a grim marker to a year in which the mosquito-borne illness has already shown up in blood donations and mosquito traps across multiple counties.
NCDHHS reported the deaths on social media, according to the Raleigh News & Observer, which first reported the fatalities. The department had already confirmed its first West Nile virus case of the year in a Gaston County resident earlier in 2026, and a West Nile virus-positive blood donor was separately identified in Mecklenburg County through routine screening this year, the paper reported.
West Nile virus is carried by wild birds and spreads to people through bites from infected mosquitoes, which pick up the virus by biting infected birds, where it multiplies. The virus does not spread from person to person. Most infected people experience no symptoms at all, while about one in five develop fever, headache, body aches and joint pain, and roughly one in 150 develop severe neurological illness marked by high fever, neck stiffness, disorientation, seizures and paralysis, the state agency said, per the same report. There is no vaccine or specific medication to cure the infection, and NCDHHS has urged anyone who is ill or believes they may have been exposed to contact a health care provider.
Why Official Case Counts Likely Undercount the Real Spread
State regulations only require healthcare providers to report the most severe, neuroinvasive cases of West Nile virus, which means the published tallies capture just a sliver of actual infections. Health officials estimate that for every recorded neuroinvasive case, as many as 20 febrile cases and 100 asymptomatic infections go unreported, according to a NCDHHS clinical guidance memo distributed to state clinicians in August…