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 mosquitoes.
What is happening this year that is different from years past to reduce the numbers of mosquitoes?
Goodman said, “Last year the rain started pretty late in the spring, and what happens is, these mosquitoes are out laying eggs all winter long, where there’s usually no rain, or very little rain. And so the numbers of these mosquito eggs just continue to build up. And they survive for a long time, a year. And so when you have the first rain, depending on how many eggs are laying out there in salt marshes, and in all the tidal areas, you get huge broods coming off, billions of these things coming off quickly. And that’s what happened last year. And it was just all over the Keys, and that happens under those conditions. This year we’ve had more rain earlier in the year. We’ve already had a lot of rain. Last week for us was really busy, but right now, all of Florida is officially still in a drought. But in the Florida Keys, we are pretty close to normal with the rain that we had, still a little bit below, but with the rain that we had and the high tides that we’ve had recently, we’ve had a lot of activity with larvae. We’ve had a number of missions yesterday, all up and down the Keys for larvae. It wasn’t a tremendous number of acres, but it was a lot of different sites, all up and down the Keys that we used aerial larvicide to get those under control. We did use a few trucks. We had to get everything done yesterday because the wind is back today, and we had a very narrow window there, but it looks like we got all of the larvae taken care of all up and down the Keys. So right now, I think the counts are low, but we’re in good shape, but we’re waiting for the next rain now. So the season certainly has started and mosquito control is ready.”
LiDAR mapping is used to find areas where the high tides are coming in more than normal.
Goodman said, “So we’re seeing a lot of new tidal areas. We’ve also met with all of the managers for the protected lands, all up and down to Keys, and obtained some concessions on the numbers of mosquitoes that we have to actually count before we can begin spraying. For the Aedes aegypti, the one that carries the disease we’re using, Wolbachia, and that is one of the things that we’re trying. We also have a new chemical that was just approved by the EPA last year, and we are starting to use it because the main chemicals that we’ve been using for the Aedes aegypti, that mosquito, is becoming more and more resistant to them. So we’re looking at new technologies. So those are what we’re really looking at, and also the larvicidal treatments that we use we’re planning to do more of those this year than we have been. So those are things right now.”
The Aedes aegypti numbers are pretty low.
Goodman said, “Dengue fever and chikungunya are still being introduced into other counties in the state, particularly Miami Dade, but it’s fallen off the last few months. There’s been no local transmission in the state of Florida the last several weeks, but still a lot of travel related cases coming in. We had two travel related cases of Chikungunya in Key West last month. Somebody came in, in this case from Cuba, and they were diagnosed with a mosquito borne disease, the health department alerts us. And we go into that neighborhood, and we do real intensive treating, trying to eliminate every Aedes aegypti mosquito in that neighborhood and so and that works very effective for us, because we don’t want that person that’s infected to be bitten by one of our local Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Therefore it would infect our mosquitoes, and then we can have local transmission. So our strategy works pretty well, as long as the people do go to the health department and we’re notified about it. The problem is sometimes when they don’t, you can have a lot of cases locally transmitting there and not even know it, because no one is reported being sick. Aedes aegypti carries the dengue fever and the chikungunya. The Dengue fever is the one that we have really been concerned with for the last couple of years. Now, chikungunya has kind of taken its place. And the difference between those two diseases is that a lot more people get sick with Chikungunya than they do Dengue fever. They show symptoms. So, the health department has really been alerting us and the CDC that we’re expecting this year in Florida to be worse than normal for these mosquito borne diseases. So we’re really on high alert here in the Florida Keys, and we’ll do everything we can to keep those diseases out.”
What are the sources of the ongoing innovative technology?
Goodman said, “Mosquito control worldwide is a relatively small market. When you look at the chemical industry, it’s it’s less than $2 billion for chemicals worldwide for mosquito control, compared to the Agricultural Chemical market, which is about $300 billion, so there’s very little technology developed, especially for mosquito control from the chemical side and also from the machinery or application apparatus side. So a lot of the innovative solutions that we have are in house developed, not only here in the Florida Keys, but in other mosquito control districts, mainly in Florida. Most of these developments really come from Florida, because this is where the mosquitoes are, basically. And what we have done recently, we have a lot of different types of spray equipment that goes in trucks. And what was becoming a problem in one area was that we had to have different trucks for different types of spray because these things are anchored into the back and they’re not really easily taken out. And our engineers came up with removable bed liners that we can put these in and out quickly using a forklift. So we can use three and four different types of sprayers in the same truck. So it makes us a lot more versatile. That’s just one example. We’ve got what we call an autoloader that we take out with the helicopter on the landing sites to reload fuel and chemicals into it, something that we developed in house and on all the offshore islands. We have trail cameras that really are taking pictures of breeding sites on there and let us know when the larvae is in those sites, rather than people having to go out there every day. And I can go on and on a lot of things like this that really have improved our effectiveness and efficiency in mosquito control. And it’s really hats off to the engineering group that we have here at Florida Keys Mosquito Control District. We have a really good team all the way from our leader, our Executive Director, all through our engineering and all our technical people, really assembled a good team of individuals who really are dedicated to controlling mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. So it works very well for us.”
Florida Keys Mosquito Control had an open house this past Saturday in Marathon and it was a huge success.
Goodman said, “There’s so many new visitors and residents in the Florida Keys, and back years ago, people who grew up here understood mosquito control and mosquito problems that we had, but now a lot of the new residents, they they coming from areas that really have no mosquito control or a very different type of mosquito control. So it’s very important that we raise the awareness in the community of mosquito control and trying to get people more familiar with what we do and why and how we do things, and because we have problems with people when they move in, let’s say they rent a home here for several months, and mosquito control comes by to do inspections. A lot of them just really don’t know who we are. They don’t know whether to let us on their property or not, and it’s very important that we be able to get on there and inspect for Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and other mosquitoes breeding on those sites. And so we’re trying, we’re working with a lot of different organizations, trying to get the message out, and it’s a real challenge here in the Florida Keys. We appreciate radio programs like yours, , helping us get this message out so that people can be aware. We’ve always been kind of a behind the scenes operation, mosquito control, doing our job keeping the numbers down, but now, we find that, particularly with disease transmission really increasing worldwide, it’s more and more important that people understand what we’re doing and what they can do to help because most of these Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are bred on our properties. If everyone would go out and dump all their water every week, we would not have much of a mosquito disease problem with Aedes aegypti. But that’s not the case, but we’re working hard to correct that and this statewide Mosquito Control Awareness Week is one of the ways that we’re doing it. We did have an open house. It was well attended. People really got to see firsthand. We had a lot of science stations set up, learning what we do is the science of mosquito control and looking at our equipment. We had demonstrations with our helicopters and a lot of things for the kids to do. So it was a really good event. We’ll continue to do this more and more and trying to get the message out, because it looks like that’s the situation here in the Keys, we’re going to continue to get more and more people. Our tourism goes up, and a lot of residential properties have been sold, new owners coming in, and we’ve got a lot to do from the education side.”
The commission met today at 1.
Goodman said, “We have several meetings, one being our audit committee meeting, and we’ll have a regular meeting. We also at 10 o’clock this morning, we have a workshop that started this is probably the most significant thing, where we will have our county mayor Michelle Lincoln will be there, and also the TDC President Kara Franker and her team, will have a workshop where we will discuss mosquito control issues, give them a tour, let them know what we’re doing, and all going back to education, because the Tourist Development Council, I guess, with mosquito control has such a big impact on the economy. Where in the state of Florida, if you’re one out of every eight jobs based on tourism, which wouldn’t be here without mosquito control. So here in the Florida Keys, we have about a three and a half billion dollar market that tourists bring in every year, about 5 million tourists supporting about 24,000 jobs here in the Keys that also wouldn’t exist to a very great degree without mosquito control, plus a $250 million real estate market here in the Florida Keys. So we want to be sure that the people that are working with the tourists and the real estate understand what we’re doing, and maybe can help us be sure to get the word out what and get some ideas of how we can better get the message out to people in the Keys and what we can do to help them as well. So I think it’ll be a very productive workshop. We had the Board of Realtors in to do a similar thing last month. Very, very productive. And we will have the Lodging Association in a couple of months to do the same thing. So we’re working to try to do everything we can to help get the message out and be sure our partners are also aware of the issues that we have, and we all work together for for everyone’s benefit.”
For more information, click here: https://www.keysmosquito.org/