Phil Goodman, Florida Keys Mosquito Control District 2 Commissioner and Board Chair, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on with the mosquitoes.
Mosquito control has come a long way over the recent decades.
Goodman said, “Not many people are here today who remember what mosquitoes were like here 50, 75 years ago. Even though we still have mosquitoes, we still have mosquito borne diseases, it’s really very small percentages, and it’s not a negative impact on the economy like in most of the tropical world today. So we’ve really come a long way, and it’s no longer an economic deterrent to development here in the Florida Keys and in Florida. We’re working on our budgets now, and the budget, I think, really shows a really great return on investment to everybody, something everybody can participate in with what’s going on, and mosquito control is kind of the foundation of all that. It’s a prerequisite before you can have almost anything in a tropical climate, like the Keys.”
What are the current numbers for mosquitoes in our area?
Goodman said, “For the salt marsh mosquito, May and June were pretty tough months for us, and early July, because we had so many new breeding sites and also the weather, we had to cancel about almost 100 missions during that time. But since that time, we’ve caught up. We had hundreds of new breeding sites in the Keys this year, which is quite unusual. We have thousands of breeding sites always in the Keys, but we have about a 30, 40 year history of really good records showing where breeding sites historically are and every year we have new ones and we lose some old ones, but it’s usually a small percentage. This year it was huge and all across the state and when you’re looking at 100,000 acres of land, salt marshes, to find a little breeding site in, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. So a lot of the helicopter missions that you’ve seen the last few months have actually been our inspectors, with the pilots flying over the salt marshes, looking for new breeding sites, and then once they find an area where there is water, where it wasn’t before, then they send the inspector down on the ground, will actually go out there and start to be sure that there are mosquitoes breeding there. So it’s like finding a needle in a haystack, in a way. But we found hundreds of them so far this year, and I think we have all of them now. We think we do, so the numbers are coming down. This was a salt marsh mosquito. The Aedes aegypti mosquito, they carries the diseases, we have been able to keep it under pretty good control all year long, all over the Keys. The numbers go up and down a little bit, but still mostly below our threshold there. So that’s the good news. But right now, I think we pretty much got a handle on what the new salt marsh mosquitoes are doing. So things I think are looking good. It should be more of a normal season here on out.”
What are the mosquito borne diseases?
Goodman said, “We have no mosquito borne diseases at this time in the Florida Keys, but our neighbor to the north, Miami, they’re continuing to get cases of primarily Dengue fever, even on up to Brevard County, which is where the really hot spot is, unusual this year, for Dengue fever, which is quite north, but our public enemy number one here is the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries the Dengue fever. It also carries chikungunya and yellow fever and Zika. So it’s the one that we are mainly interested in here in the Keys to control. We kept the numbers down really good, where that mosquito is becoming resistant to some of our pesticides, so that’s why we use using some of this new technology, like Wolbachia, right now, running extended trials on there to get help. But our focus is not really on the disease. It’s on the mosquito that carries disease, and Aedes aegypti, people ask me, well, what are you going to do when Chikungunya gets here? We’re already prepared because we are really working hard to control the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries that. I think we’re well prepared for it. That disease cycles every five to 10 years. It was here in the US and in Florida, I think about 300 cases in Florida back in 2014. It’s a real it’s a terrible disease. It’s similar to Dengue. The mortality rate is not as high as with Dengue on that but the name is from an African dialect, which means to be contorted. So you get real muscle contortions, bone aches similar to Dengue fever, and these can last for months. The disease spreads more rapidly than Dengue, because about 85% of the people who get the disease show symptoms. So whereas Dengue, it’s about 20% so it can spread rapidly, and it’s really running in epidemic proportions right now in a lot of Asian countries, in the Indian Ocean islands, and we’ve had five cases here in Florida this year that are travel related. So we’re really on high alert, because we expect that disease, particularly next year, could be a factor here in the US, but we are prepared with what we’re doing with Aedes aegypti mosquito and, the Wolbachia project is one of the things that we’re doing right now as new technology to help control the Aedes aegypti. So far we’re doing a really good job controlling that mosquito, and we’ll continue to work hard at it.”
What is the Wolbachia project?
Goodman said, “We’ve got three sites, 20 acre sites in the Keys that we have been releasing. We release Tuesdays and Fridays on three 20 acre sites in the Keys, and we monitor it. We’re doing a lot of sampling there. We’re not going to draw any conclusions until we finish the program, which will be sometime in October. We’ve been releasing since May and everything is going as planned. We are seeing a reduction in the numbers of the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in those areas. But it’s a pretty complicated statistical calculation that we have to do at the end to really draw some conclusions. So we’re going to wait until the end to do that. We’re also working with the irradiated mosquito, which is another type of the sterile insect technique. Right now, Collier County and Lee County are doing extensive work with that. Several other counties are doing Wolbachia. We’re all still waiting for the Oxitec to be approved, which hopefully will be in time to be able to use next season. Everybody’s really anxious about that. A lot of new technologies available, all for the Aedes aegypti mosquito, because we have malaria mosquito here, and we have the mosquito that carries West Nile virus, and but all of those mosquitoes here, in the Keys, we have very good control over them, and they’re not resistant to the chemical pesticides we use. The Aedes aegypti is, so that makes it particularly important for us to control. We’re working hard to do it, and so far, we’ve been successful, and we’ll continue to work hard.”
How’s the budget?
Goodman said, “We’re looking at rollback budget for this year, which we’ve had for the last few years. We had a 10 year plan to replace our aging fleet of aircraft, and we’re buying our last one to complete that process this year. So right now it looks like we are not going to raise taxes at all this year. We’ve had a lot of new technology that’s allowed us to really control costs, and so we’re looking for rollback. We have a meeting today, and at that meeting today, I think we’ll declare our rollback budget. But we like to kind of get through the month of August before we make really any claims on that, because July and August is our big months for chemical usage and for mosquito control application technology, but so far, everything is pretty much like we expected. So we’re looking for a rollback budget, and I’m not talking about rollback millage rate. I’m talking about actual ad valorem taxes. So we don’t see any tax increase for mosquito control right now.”
Remember to watch your property for standing water.
Goodman said, “The Aedes aegypti mosquito is really our Public Enemy number one here. Almost 100% of those mosquitoes are bred on our personal properties. They’re not bred out in the mangroves or out in the salt marshes. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are bred around our home because they prefer human blood to make their eggs, and they like to live around people. So the problems that we’re causing with Dengue and other things really are self inflicted in one way, if everybody could go around their property once a week and dump outstanding water or if you’ve got real problems, call mosquito control or put in a service request, we’d be happy to come out because, this is a self inflicted wound, basically, that we’re doing here because we’re not policing our properties like we should, and that’s causing the problem. So we can all help ourselves a lot if we would go over our properties every week and dump out any kind of standing water, because that’s where the Aedes aegypti lay their eggs.”
For more information, click here: https://www.keysmosquito.org/