Phil Goodman with the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on with mosquitoes.
Despite the fact that the rain has dissipated a bit, we can’t get complacent.
Goodman said, “We still have a lot to do. We did have some rain this past weekend. We had up to four and a half inches in certain parts of the Keys. So we still have a lot of larvae being produced, but right now, it’s really under control. We had all of our helicopters out recently, and these new helicopters that we have really help us when we have widespread rains, like we did, all up and down the Keys, we can cover a lot of area quickly because we only have a narrow window to really get into the larvae before they become flying adults. So right now, things are under pretty good control in the Keys. Another thing that helped us this time of year is the king tides. Normally, the high tides hurt us earlier in the year because they open up new breeding sites, and we have a lot of new breeding to take care of. But in the fall, when the high king tides come in, a lot of times they really are so high they just wash through all of the offshore islands and bring in fish, which really helps us control the mosquitoes. So we we certainly appreciate their help this time of year. So right now, things are looking really good for mosquito counts for the salt marsh mosquito, which is really our number one nuisance mosquito. So right now it looks like we’ll be able to continue treating regularly, hopefully the weather will cooperate so that it won’t slow us down and we can continue to control mosquitoes all the way through November. Actually down here, we may get a little bit of a rest in December and January, but here we have mosquitoes all year round. So mosquito control is always on the job.”
The breeding sites can be really problematic.
Goodman said, “The salt marsh mosquito can breed here in the Florida Keys, and some of these offshore islands and these mangroves and the salt marshes, up to 2 billion mosquitoes per acre, sometimes 45,000 per square foot. This is not just one time in the season. This is every time it rains. So you get this continuously, and we have thousands of these in the Keys. So this is really what keeps us busy. Most of our control now is controlling the larvae before they’re flying. So that’s why, you see a lot less mosquitoes flying here than you did 30, 40, 50 years ago, when we were controlling mosquitoes by killing the adults only, but it’s a sight to see some of these large breeding sites. Some of these things cover whole acres and just billions of them in there, so they need constant control.”
There are no mosquito borne diseases in the Keys right now.
Goodman said, “We’ve been able to keep it out, but there’s about 14 counties right now in Florida that are under mosquito borne disease alert awareness from the Department of Health. We’ve had some in some parts of Florida, particularly in the north, West Nile virus, also Dengue fever, is continuing to increase. We had a lot last week of imported cases coming in. So we continue to have that in local transmission. Miami is a good example of they have a lot of these different diseases there and I know they’re working hard to try to control it. The one that we’re really concerned about for next year is Chikungunya, and we’ve just had, it was a local case in New York, this last week’s the first local case we’ve had in the United States. Since, I think 2015, these things run in cycles, and this disease is really epidemic proportions in a lot of Asian countries, in islands, in the Indian Ocean and it’s moving this way. It’s also big in Cuba now, so we’re seeing a lot of local transmission of Chikungunya coming into Florida. No local cases, but travel related cases coming in mainly from Cuba. So this is something that we are on real high alert for this, because the Aedes aegypti carries Dengue fever, Chikungunya, yellow fever, Zika, so that’s our main disease vector here. So far, we work really hard to keep this under control and and do a pretty good job. But sometimes when the rain and the wind prevents us from treating like we should, we get behind on those numbers. But right now, this season, we’ve kept those numbers in pretty good shape, and we have some new technology that we’re working on that I think that will really help us there in the future as well.”
With Fantasy Fest upon us, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District has worked to make sure mosquitoes don’t ruin the festivities.
Goodman said, “We are very sensitive about our impact on the economy of Florida. Huge impact on the economy from mosquito control, because people are not going to come here, spend hundreds of dollars a night to be eaten alive by mosquitoes and go home with some kind of disease that may affect them for the rest of their lives. So that’s foremost in our mind. Fantasy Fest is a big economic driver for the Keys. So every year we have what we call a sweep in Key West. This year, we spent about four and a half days there. We had about 16 of our inspectors coming from other parts of the Keys, really go in and we we went literally to every property, business and residence in Key West. I was about nearly 5,000 properties that we visited, and we did nearly 700 treatments where we found Aedes aegypti mosquitoes actually breeding on almost 700 properties. We use this as education as well for the property owner, showing them what they can do, also to protect this, because we can’t go to 5,000 houses every week. So it’s very important for us to be able to teach people what to do on their own property. So as a result, I think we’ve really worked hard to be sure that Fantasy Fest is going to go off without mosquito problems. We continue to keep an eye on the Fantasy Zone all throughout there to be sure that if it rains or something, that we can really keep those numbers down, so that everybody coming here has a good experience in Key West with Fantasy Fest and these sweeps we also do at different times of the year for the Middle and Upper Keys as well. So this is a good way for us to to help be sure we’re protecting the economy, but also instructing individuals what they can do to help us keep it that way long term.”
Mosquito control is really important.
Goodman said, “One thing that we noticed is mosquito control is a really misunderstood organization by a lot of people, because we have so many new people coming into the Keys, and they come from areas that maybe mosquitoes are not a big problem, or maybe they have no mosquito control, because this is a specialty of Florida, and really South Florida. Florida would be basically, particularly South Florida, and the Keys would be uninhabitable without mosquito control. So we realize this, and we also want to be sure that everybody knows this. Because if you go on the internet, sometimes social media, we get blasted a lot for people get bit by mosquitoes, or they don’t like us spraying. So we want people to understand another element of this is that our impact on the economy, we try to keep a balance of what we do. We can’t kill all the mosquitoes. That’s not our goal. We work hard to keep the diseases out, which we’ve done a very good job there, and that’s our number one goal, but we also want to be sure that people don’t look at just what it costs to control mosquitoes, what’s the return on investment, and the thing that people don’t understand is it’s expensive to control mosquitoes here, but we had about three and a half billion dollars of tourist money coming into the Keys last year, which supported about 24,000 jobs. This wouldn’t happen if people came in if mosquitoes were a huge problem. It’s never perfect, but we control 80% to 90% of the mosquitoes that are here. Sometimes that is not as good as we would like, but with all the restrictions we have, that’s kind of the way it is right now. But what would it be like without a mosquito control? You would have 10, 20, 50 times more mosquitoes than you have now. There’s not much difference in the Florida Keys, in the Everglades, without mosquito control, we’re all kind of part of the same. So we just want people to understand that, and it’s not perfect, but we are probably the number one mosquito control in the world, here in the Florida Keys, world class organization. So we have to be at the forefront of new technologies and things and to keep it that way, plus we’re here where the mosquitoes are. So our residents and visitors expect us to be good at mosquito control, so we work hard to deliver that, and we wanted to get the message out. Sometimes that getting the message out here in the Florida Keys is not so easy, and we really appreciate your station really helping us get the message out. So it’s very important for us.”
Meetings will be happening today in Marathon.
Goodman said, “We have about five meetings today. We start at one o’clock this afternoon. Some of these are regular meetings, like our audit meeting, and we will look at our retiree healthcare program and a few other things in addition to our regular meeting, but we have a workshop where we will focus on our Community Survey. About every seven, eight years, we will do a big community survey where we send out mailers. We ask the community how we’re doing to get response back. What should we be doing differently or better? We’ve been collecting this for the last several months, and we’ve got a really good response back. So today, we’ll be going over that. I’ve seen the results and and the results are really positive. There’s some good things, some good suggestions as well, but it’s really important for us to hear from the community, like I was mentioning, sometimes here in the Keys, it’s very difficult to get your message out, and so we try a lot of different ways to to get our message out and also to get feedback from the community. So today we’ll be talking about that, but I think the results have been very positive for that.”
The Wolbachia trial for the sterile insect release for the Aedes aegypti is finishing up this week.
Goodman said, “We also have just adopted a new chemical. There’s really been not a chemical approved by the EPA for mosquito control, for controlling adult mosquitoes in decades, and there was one approved two years ago. We’ve been looking at it for the past two years, and we’ve just recently approved it for use in our trucks. So this product, there’s no resistance from the Aedes aegypti mosquito. So this gives us another tool for that, plus it’s a third product that we can use in our trucks to rotate for the salt marsh mosquito. Because sometimes we’re limited to how many times we can treat a neighborhood with the same product. So this gives us another product to use. So this is some really big news for mosquito control here in the Keys.”
For more information, click here: https://www.keysmosquito.org/