WEST NILE - KILLER BEES ALL OVER AGAIN.

Byline: MARIEL GARZA

SHHH. Don't tell anyone, but I have a bird bath in my back yard. Worse, it's filled with water. Standing water, if you know what I mean.

In Los Angeles, this makes me a criminal. This gives authorities the right to enter my property to search for evidence that I am harboring disease-bearing mosquitoes as part of my patio landscaping, and to upset my bird bath all over the yard, drying clothes be damned.

And it's not just me. Anyone with a birdbath that hasn't been cleaned in a while, or an unmaintained pool, or a koi pond that's become a bit rank could be brewing up a deadly cocktail of West Nile Virus mosquitoes just itching to paint the region red. And that's soon to be a crime under new laws being cooked up by both Los Angeles county and city officials and set for final approval in September.

I always figured when the day came that I had to worry about government authorities storming my gate that it would involve more drama than bugs. Something to do with my struggle against tyranny by publishing illegal tracts advocating a peaceful, yet stern, revolution against the All-Powerful and Far-Seeing Governator of Californialand.

But this is like choking to death on a Chicken McNugget. I just don't want to go down in such a silly way.

Statistically speaking, I am more likely to be pecked to death by thirsty birds than to die of West Nile Virus. According to the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services' handy ``Fight the Bite?'' fact sheet, ``Most mosquitoes do not have WNV.'' And even if I should contract it, 80 percent of people have no symptoms or ones so mild they just shrug it off as feeling under the weather.

But those kind of numbers don't mean much to to someone deep in the throes of West Nile mania - an ailment, I fear, is much more dangerous than West Nile Virus.

Every year or so it seems things get a bit boring and we concoct some monster to scare ourselves silly. When I was a kid, it was the dreaded killer bees, which had broken out of a South American lab and were beelining straight for my neighborhood. TV movies and hype about how aggressive the bees were only helped to spread the buzz.

But when the bees did finally arrive, many years after they were predicted, it was disappointing. A few people got swarmed and died, some because they did dumb things like throw rocks at the bees' hives. That's not terror, it's justice of the jungle.

Remember the hanta virus? That was big for minute in 1993 when a small number of people in the American Southwest accidentally breathed in deer mouse poop and contracted a strain of the horrible and fatal disease. For a while, the news reports made it sound like it was the next super-flu.

It wasn't, and we forgot about it until we needed something else to fear.

How about the SARS ``epidemic'' in 2002? Only eight Americans even contracted it. The mad cow madness? In the larger contexts of microscopic mass murderers, like influenza, AIDS, plague, they are nothing.

Just for comparison's sake, on most weekends many more people die of violence in this county than have been stricken by the West Nile Virus. Every year, the flu kills about 36,000 Americans.

Not to be unfeeling to the afflicted, but only 100 people out of 18 million in Los Angeles are known to have contracted West Nile disease as of last week, with four deaths.

And we're ready to announce mosquito police and bust avian sympathizers over a few deaths? This West Nile Virus scare has got killer bee hype written all over it.

These ordinances will really only make it easier for county health enforcers to do what they already do - inspect and abate hazards on private property, and give them teeth when threatening property owners. It's important that we each do our own part not to inadvertently create mosquito habitats. I, for one, promise to clean out my bird bath.

But the idea of making it easier for authorities to bust in over something that, at this point anyhow, is little more than an overblown story, seems excessive.

Besides, when the end-of-the-world disease that many doomsayers say is inevitable finally hits, don't think the mosquito police, or any version of them, will stop it.