Phil Goodman, Commissioner for District Two, board chair of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on with the mosquitoes.
Mosquito counts seem to up recently.
Goodman said, “This last week was very busy for mosquito control. We’re seeing numbers right now mosquitoes in the middle of May, that we don’t usually see until the middle of June, a little bit later in the season. But it’s not all that unusual. Mosquitoes here in the Florida Keys, they’re here all year round. Not as many in the winter, but they’re laying eggs all winter long. So these billions of eggs just continue to build up everywhere along the Keys, and we don’t have really any rain to speak of to hatch them. So the first rains and high tides in the spring, the first several we see, we see huge hatches, and that’s what we’ve seen. We saw the first one several weeks ago. We saw another one last week, because of mainly the high tide that we had last week and a little bit of rain the weekend before, we saw the high tides coming in, and just in Stock Island alone, we saw about 10 new breeding sites created that we had never seen before. So this happens routinely all along, but not in big swings like we saw this time. Particularly in the Lower and Middle Keys, we had a lot of mosquitoes this week. We have them under control now. We think pretty good all up and down the Keys. But just the last week, we treated about 6,000 acres by air. We had over 30 truck missions, mostly in the Lower and Middle Keys, some of the Upper Keys, and we started also doing some of the missions by truck in the early morning, in addition to late at night, so that we can we can cover a lot of area in a shorter period of time. But things are looking pretty good right now. We’ve got it under control, and it looks like now, it’ll be more or less business as usual. We’ll just hopefully be able to stay ahead of the game. When it rains, we’ll be able to get out larvicide quickly. The winds also delayed us this last time some. We had winds for quite a period of time, which did delay a number of our missions. But this period is a little bit over now, so we think now the rest of the season will be more in a normal trend, which there’s really nothing normal about mosquito control. The only thing that’s common every year is that we have a lot of mosquitoes, but we’re ready and out there working hard to keep this community comfortable and safe.”
Billions of eggs waiting to hatch can certainly be a daunting task.
Goodman said, “Something happens every year, sometimes it’s worse than others. This year was about as bad as I’ve seen. It takes a few rains and a few high tides to kind of get all of this behind us. We think now, most of this is behind us. So what we’ll be seeing now, as far as hatching will be eggs that are being laid every day now. So we can typically keep up with that. Mosquito control is a very complex science, but it’s not an exact science. We have a lot of variables to contend with that hamper our control efforts, but that’s our business. That’s what we do. So we’re ready to begin this season, and I think we’ve got everything we need to again, have a good mosquito control season.”
One reason to control mosquitoes is to control mosquito borne diseases.
Goodman said, “It’s early in the season right now, but our travel related cases of mosquito borne diseases continue to come into Florida. Most of these are from Central and South America and there’s many countries where these diseases are endemic. Miami, particular, and other airports in Florida are major hubs for people coming into this country, and they are bringing disease with them. We’ve had a number of cases of travel related. We’ve only had one local transmission in Florida, and that was in Miami Dade of dengue fever a few months ago. But it’s early in the season. So this will continue. The last two years have been record years for Florida, particularly for dengue fever, and particularly in Miami. We’ve been fortunate here to really keep this out. But it’s a struggle every day because of all of the visitors coming in to have the potential for mosquito borne disease. So we’re looking out for dengue fever. Malaria is another disease that is coming into Florida in pretty big numbers, travel related as well, and so we’re on the lookout for that. Chikungunya is another one that we’ve only had one travel related case in Florida this year. But in the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean, their countries over there that are just seeing huge epidemics right now of Chikungunya coming back again. A lot of these diseases are cyclic, and they may not appear for five or 10 years, and then they come back. So that’s what we’re seeing right now with Chikungunya, which all these diseases have some similarities, dengue and Chikungunya are very bad diseases that have a mortality rate, but it’s relatively low, and at least right now. Malaria is quite different, but those numbers are low as well as in Florida. So all of Florida is really actively working on everything that we can do to keep these diseases out. But it’s a constant struggle, and it’s new, really, from the last 10 years, basically, as this phenomena has started again because of increased travel into Florida from some of these countries where these diseases are endemic and will continue to be endemic.”
Why has dengue fever been increasing so much over the years?
Goodman said, “These mosquito borne diseases have always run through a cycle, where maybe you would have an outbreak quite large, and then you would go five to 10 years and have still outbreaks, but very much smaller and then in a five to 10 year cycle, you would have another big outbreak, larger than the one before, and then maybe another five to 10 year period where you don’t have very much and the reason there is thought to be herd immunity, where you get a large part of the population that have had these diseases, they get an immunity and more or less, the number of cases drops, and that’s what’s happening with Chikungunya right now. As I mentioned, it’s been about a 10 year cycle on that one, and it’s coming back. But Dengue fever is a little bit different. Dengue fever used to follow the same but there are four different types of dengue fever called serotypes. They’re all related. But if you get one, you get an immunity, and you don’t get it again. This used to be factored by herd immunity, where you would get this, and then it would be five to 10 years before it would come again. But with these four serotypes that are now circulating, and all of them are in Florida, all four are in Florida. All four are circulating all throughout the Caribbean, in South and Central America. So you don’t have this herd immunity, because you get one and then you get another and the herd immunity so far, after 10 years, has really not been applicable for this disease. One of the problems is you get one of them, like Dengue, one, you get it, and then you have an immunity for it. But dengue, two, three or four, if you get that, then the mortality rate increases and the severity of the disease increase, where you can develop a higher chance for hemorrhagic fever, which is really the real danger there. We see more and more dengue one and three case here in Florida, but two and four are also transmitting as well. So the herd immunity is not a real factor right now. So this is another thing that’s got health officials really concerned and mosquito control officials because you don’t want anybody to get it the first time, but you definitely don’t want anybody to get it the second time, and the more people that get it the first time, then you have the better chance for getting a second infection. So that’s what we’re looking at. There were people in Florida that did have severe dengue and hemorrhagic fever last year based on travel related, where they had several different types of dengue fever. So it’s just something else for us to really be on the lookout for. So Dengue fever for us here in the Florida Keys, is by far the one that we’re most concerned with. The mosquito that carries malaria, they’re not as large numbers here. Plus our pesticides control the malaria mosquitoes pretty well. But the Aedes aegypti is not really well controlled. It’s become resistant to the pesticides that we use, some of them and that’s the same mosquito that carries Chikungunya. So this is something that we’re really working hard to try to control best we can, the Aedes aegypti mosquito. It’s public enemy number one here in the Florida Keys.”
Technology has given us methodologies that can really help with mosquitoes, like the Wolbachia program.
Goodman said, “In the first week of June, we will begin releases of Wolbachia mosquitoes. These are mosquitoes, male mosquitoes that don’t bite. They will be released in three areas. Two will be in the Upper Keys, one will be in the Middle Keys in the Marathon area. We’ll be releasing over the course of the year, about a little bit less than 2 million mosquitoes in these three sites, starting in June and going through October. These will be very controlled tests where we also have a control area that we’ll be monitoring, too. We’ll be doing everything in these control areas that we’re doing in the test areas with the Wolbachia, so that we can see how effective the Wolbachia is in those areas, but basically, what we’re doing is we’re releasing male mosquitoes that have the Wolbachia bacteria that has been imparted into their into their system and this is a bacteria that’s common in most mosquitoes. Most mosquitoes that don’t carry disease have the Wolbachia bacteria, so it’s not a bad bacteria, but when it’s put into the Aedes aegypti male mosquito, and that mosquito mates with a wild female, there are no viable offspring. So you continue to release these Wolbachia males into the environment and 1.8 million is how many we’re releasing in the Keys, but as soon as you release them, these males go to a bush and start looking for females to mate with. They only live for a few days. But you continue to release these, and we’ll be releasing them twice a week over this time period and we expect to see the numbers of Aedes aegypti in those test areas to drop significantly, hopefully below 10% of the amount that we started with. We’ve proven this before. This was approved by the EPA at the end of last year to be effective and safe. We ran trials about six years ago here in the Keys with this technology, and just been kind of waiting to see, to get its approval from the EPA and now we have it so we can start using this. So we’re starting out slow in some really hot spot areas to see if this can be a tool that we can use, along with our other technologies, to bring these numbers of mosquitoes down. Because when it rains and wind blows, we can’t really treat as well and sometimes these numbers of Aedes aegypti really increase. So these Wolbachia mosquitoes are out working 24/7, they don’t care if it’s raining or the wind is blowing. So this will give us some added protection to bring these numbers down, and hopefully this will be proven to be an effective tool that we can use regularly here in the Florida Keys to help us keep the community safe.”
The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District met today.
Goodman said, “One of the main topics will be to approve our strategic plan. We we’ve been working with strategic plan for a decade now, and it’s become a big part of our overall performance planning out what we’re going to be doing and then we start next month, we’ll start into our budget process. So we like to have our strategic plan in place before we begin budgeting, to be sure that we can pay for what we’re doing. But the strategic plan gets more and more complicated every year. We have a lot of areas we’re looking at, safety of our people, at becoming more efficient, effective in what we do, looking at new technologies, and there’s a lot of new things that we’re doing right now with our strategic plan to help us control, so it’s a very important part of our overall success, I think, at mosquito control, is the fact that that we do plan very well for everything that we do. Also today we’ll be having the final approval of our annual audit. We had a very good audit again this year, but we’re looking at all of the data today. It’ll be making final approval here again, closing out last year, basically, and getting ready for a new budget season. A lot of things going on also will be going over the evaluation of our director, who’s done a fantastic job for us, I think. She’s always gotten really high marks and she really stays ahead of the curve on everything that we do at mosquito control. So we’re very fortunate to have her, and she’s put together an excellent team for mosquito control here in the Florida Keys to put us really one of the top mosquito control in Florida and the nation and the world, really. Nobody does mosquito control in the world like Florida does and in Florida, nobody does mosquito control like the Florida Keys. We have to. Our residents and visitors demand it. If you look at the map of Florida, and you see where it is, the coastline and the tropical nature that we have, it’s a paradise for man, but it’s also a paradise for mosquitoes. So we’re working hard to keep it where mankind is favored. It’s really a community effort because the community here in the Florida Keys really does support mosquito control, and I think they appreciate what we do. We’re not perfect. There’s still a lot of room for improvement because we still have mosquitoes out there, and we’re working hard to continue to improve, but the community is really behind us, and that’s a big part of our success, is having them along. So we’re constantly working also to keep the community educated in what we’re doing, because they can be a big part of our success, particularly the Aedes aegypti mosquito, because it’s being bred right around our homes and so as residents, we can do a lot to police our own residence and property to be sure that we’re not breeding those mosquitoes on our property. So yes, we thank the community very much for their support.”