Just weeks into mosquitoes' prime blood-sucking season, Texas public health officials are bracing for a possible encore of 2012's horrendous West Nile outbreak. "West Nile is not going to go away," said David Beasley, a microbiology professor at UTMB's Sealy Center for Vaccine Development. "Activity may decline for a while but that doesn't mean we can forget about it because we're going to periodically see this kind of resurgence, and we have to be able to detect increased activity to give public health people a chance to respond." Alan Barrett, a virologist at UTMB who sequences virus strains, last fall told the journal Nature that "we are definitely seeing evolution of the virus." But he added we really don't understand what "causes more or less disease from year to year." [Note: Subscription required.] The article also appears in the San Antonio Express-News.