West Nile Virus Is Spreading Across Southern Europe Right Now. Here's What Anyone Living There Actually Needs to Know

If you've relocated to Spain, Italy, Greece, or Portugal — or you're planning to — there's a health story unfolding this month that deserves a spot next to the visa paperwork and the apartment hunt. West Nile virus is having its worst season in years across Southern Europe, and unlike most travel-safety scares, this one has hard numbers behind it, not just headlines.

West Nile Virus Is Spreading Across Southern Europe Right Now

The numbers, as of this week

According to the latest figures from Greece's National Public Health Organization (EODY) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), this is where things stand as of mid-August 2026:

• Greece: 110 confirmed cases since the season began, up from just 65 two weeks earlier. Of those, 81 patients developed severe central nervous system involvement — encephalitis, meningitis, or paralysis. Nine people have died, all over the age of 65. Last year's entire season produced 96 cases total; this year has already passed that with weeks of peak season still ahead.

• Italy: at least 94 confirmed cases across 30 affected areas, spanning both the north and center of the country — Milan, Verona, Cremona, Florence, Naples, Padua. Italy's 2025 season, for comparison, ended with 779 cases and 72 deaths — a 9.2% fatality rate among confirmed infections, the highest in the EU that year.

• Spain, France, Romania, North Macedonia: all reporting active local transmission this season, at smaller but non-trivial case counts.

• Germany: reported its first-ever locally acquired case of the 2026 season on August 6 — a genuinely new development, since Germany hasn't historically been part of the virus's established range in Europe.

Seven countries with active transmission, one clear trend: the range is expanding northward, and the case count in the hardest-hit countries is climbing faster than in most recent years.

What this actually is, in plain terms

West Nile virus doesn't spread person-to-person. It moves between birds and mosquitoes, and humans get infected incidentally when a mosquito that's fed on an infected bird bites a person. You cannot catch it from another person, from a pet, or from casual contact — only from a mosquito bite in an area where the virus is actively circulating.

Roughly 80% of infections cause no symptoms at all. Most of the remaining cases look like a bad flu — fever, fatigue, headache, body aches — and resolve on their own. The concerning outcome, and the one driving this year's death toll, is the smaller share of cases that progress to neuroinvasive disease: encephalitis (brain inflammation), meningitis, or acute flaccid paralysis. That's where the real risk concentrates, and it concentrates overwhelmingly in one group.

Who's actually at risk — and who really isn't

This is the part that gets lost in alarming headlines, and it matters for anyone deciding how worried to actually be.

People over 65 and those with chronic illness or weakened immune systems account for nearly all of the severe outcomes and virtually all of the deaths this season in Greece — every one of the nine fatalities was in someone over 65. Italy's 2025 death toll followed the same pattern.

Healthy adults and children who get infected overwhelmingly experience either no symptoms or a short, unpleasant, but non-dangerous flu-like illness. This isn't a reason to panic if you're a healthy 30-year-old who just relocated to Lisbon or Barcelona — it's a reason to take basic precautions seriously, especially if someone older or immunocompromised lives with you.

There is no licensed human vaccine, despite two decades of development attempts, and there's no antiviral treatment — care for severe cases is supportive (hospitalization, symptom management) rather than curative. That makes prevention the only real tool anyone actually has.

Where the actual hotspots are right now

If you're weighing a move or a trip to Southern Europe this summer, the risk isn't evenly distributed — it's concentrated in specific regions:

Greece: Attica (the Athens region) has historically been the epicenter, along with a growing list of municipalities that EODY updates weekly based on case proximity and local ecology. Greek health authorities have publicly flagged additional high-risk municipalities where no cases have been confirmed yet but conditions match areas that already have.

Italy: the geographic spread this year is genuinely wide — Lombardy (Milan, Cremona, Novara), Veneto (Verona, Padua), Tuscany (Florence), and Campania (Naples) all have confirmed cases, meaning this isn't a single-region problem the way it sometimes has been in past seasons.

Spain, France, Romania: smaller case counts so far, concentrated in specific provinces (Alicante and Seville in Spain, for example) rather than nationwide.

What to actually do about it

The advice here isn't complicated, and it's the same regardless of whether you're a long-term resident, a recent transplant, or visiting for two weeks:

Use mosquito repellent containing DEET, picaridin, or IR3535 during outdoor time from dusk through dawn, when the mosquito species that carry the virus are most active.

Cover up during peak hours. Long sleeves and long pants in the early morning and evening cut down exposure significantly, especially if you're near standing water, parks, or agricultural areas.

Screen your windows or use mosquito nets, particularly if you're in a ground-floor or older apartment without modern window screens — common in a lot of Southern European housing stock, especially in older city centers.

Eliminate standing water around your home — even small amounts in plant saucers, gutters, or unused containers are enough for mosquitoes to breed. This is genuinely one of the most effective individual actions available, since it reduces the local mosquito population rather than just protecting one person at a time.

If you're over 65, immunocompromised, or caring for someone who is, take the precautions above more seriously than you might for yourself alone, and don't dismiss a sudden fever or severe headache during mosquito season as "just the heat" — see a doctor, especially in an affected region.

The bigger pattern worth knowing about

This isn't a one-off. Greece has recorded West Nile transmission every year since 2010, when a strain of the virus previously considered exclusively African established itself in the country. Public health researchers link the virus's expanding range, including this year's first case in Germany, to warmer, longer mosquito seasons — the kind of shift that's making formerly temperate parts of Europe newly hospitable to mosquito-borne diseases that used to stay further south. If you're planning a long-term relocation to Southern Europe, this is realistically becoming a normal, recurring part of the summer calendar — not a freak event — and worth factoring into how you think about housing (window screens matter more than you'd expect) and healthcare access wherever you settle.

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This article is for informational purposes only and is not medical advice. If you or someone in your household develops a fever, severe headache, or neurological symptoms during mosquito season in an affected area, contact a doctor. Case counts are updated weekly by ECDC and national health authorities and may have changed since this was written.