A person in Utrecht province has died in hospital after catching West Nile virus in the Netherlands, the public health institute RIVM has said.
The fact it was caught in the Netherlands means the virus is now circulating in the local mosquito population. It is one of three such infections RIVM has recorded so far in 2026, the others infected are still in hospital.
RIVM said it would not release details about the person who died out of respect for the family. A spokesperson described them as elderly and in poor health. The death is not connected to last week’s case in a Utrecht blood donor, the first human infection caught in the Netherlands since 2020.
This year the virus has been detected in Utrecht, Noord-Brabant and Zuid-Holland – in horses, mosquitoes and birds – and RIVM has asked doctors across the country to watch for patients with symptoms of West Nile fever.
Not the start of a pandemic
A single death, even a local one, does not signal a pandemic in the making, because West Nile virus is not the type to cause one. It does not pass from person to person.
People and horses can fall seriously ill, but they are dead ends for the virus: they do not carry enough of it in their blood to reinfect a biting mosquito, so the chain stops with them.
The death does however mark the establishment of the virus in northern Europe, which scientists are linking to warmer weather. It first reached people in the Netherlands in 2020, in a small cluster around Utrecht and Arnhem.
Who is at risk
Most infections go unnoticed, and around 80% of people who catch the virus have no symptoms at all and roughly 19% develop flu-like illness. About 1% go on to serious neurological problems such as inflammation of the brain, and a small number of those die.
Mosquitoes carrying the virus are most active at dusk. In the affected provinces, covering up in the evening lowers the chance of being bitten – though RIVM stresses the odds of catching the virus in the Netherlands, let alone falling ill from it, remain very low.
Separately, the regional public health service GGD Drenthe reported last week that a woman had probably died of West Nile fever after catching it on holiday in south-eastern Europe. That was an imported case, unlike the Utrecht death.
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