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.
What are the mosquito conditions in the Keys right now?
Goodman said, “Right now, the numbers are very low all over the Keys for both the disease vector mosquito and the nuisance mosquito. It’s been a couple of weeks since we had rain of anything to speak of, and with our new helicopters, we’re able to larvicide and really take care of those mosquitoes quickly. So since there hasn’t been any rain, there’s really very few mosquitoes right now. Our people are still out looking. We know that there’s rain coming, and we’re right now spending a lot of our time doing the scheduled maintenance that we have every year in the off season, and we’re also getting ready for the new season to begin soon. One of the things that we’ll be doing differently this year is we have the Wolbachia sterile insect technique that we’ll be running a pilot operation on, starting April, May. So we’re finishing up now. We’ll know very soon where we’ll want to implement that this year. So a lot of things are happening. We expect a normal and high number of mosquitoes, just like we do every year in the new season, and we’re ready for it. The mosquito borne diseases are still coming in mainly from Cuba, coming into mainly Miami and Florida, so Dengue fever. So that’s continuing, and something that we’re continuously looking at, and we’re working hard to stay ahead of that as well.”
Last year was successful at keeping mosquitos at bay.
Goodman said, “Last year for us here in Florida Keys, we had a good year, but for Florida, it was really probably the worst year we’ve had in a long time for the whole state, almost half the counties experienced some type of mosquito borne disease. This year it’s really started back again. Because right now, a lot of this is coming in from South and Central America, and some of these countries are really in their summer time now. So it’s continuing. A lot of travel coming into Florida, particularly Miami, and those continue. So this is something I think we’re going to be faced with for a long time, and we are certainly ready here in the Florida Keys to do everything we can to combat it.”
Goodman has a long history in the chemical industry and is very well educated.
He said, “I really enjoy what we do here in the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District. I think we’re really making a difference in the lives of Floridians and when we’re in Tallahassee, that’s one of the things we do every year. We meet with the legislatures. We don’t have a lot of really special needs this year, but we like to go there to be sure that they are aware of mosquito control because mosquito control is something, if you don’t have mosquitoes, you kind of start thinking, why do we need a mosquito control? We try to continuously remind them that the mosquitoes are still there and we’re out working hard every day to protect Floridians for their comfort and their public health and the economy of the state is very dependent on mosquito control.”
Goodman will speak in March in Tallahassee at the Economics Club of Florida about how mosquito control has impacted the Florida economy.
He said, “This is something there’s very few people here in the state of Florida that really still remember how bad a mosquito problem we had 100 years ago. There was a very important speech given in the Congress in 1821 by Congressman John Randolph of Virginia. When Spain was ceded to the US, there was a lot of discussion of what are we going to do with Florida? He had a famous statement there that we don’t want Florida. They’re nothing but swamps and quagmires and nothing but alligators, disease, mosquitoes. No man would ever immigrate to Florida, not even from hell itself. That’s the way it was for several hundred years, 1700s, 1800s and really nothing started happening until about 1889 and that’s when Florida got their first department established, the Department of Public Health And Doctor Joseph Porter was named the director, and he was a very famous Key West physician, gained a lot of experience in yellow fever, and that was why the health department was started. It was because of yellow fever epidemics that we were having and then in 1923 there was a group, really led by some powerful women’s group. They had just had a big Dengue fever epidemic in Florida that started in Miami and had over 200,000 people were infected, and Florida only had a million residents at the time. So that was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back, and they had a big meeting in Daytona Beach and established the Florida Anti Mosquito Association, which today is the Florida Mosquito Control Association, which I serve on the board and things really started happening then.
Dr. Porter was also named the director of the Florida Anti Mosquito Association.
Goodman said, “Then this led to the state of Florida establishing Mosquito Control districts. The first was in the Indian River, which Indian River Lagoon was notorious for its number of mosquitoes. In fact, the area of Florida between Palm Beach and Volusia County was officially named mosquito county in the state at that time. So it just lets you know how things were really and nobody lived in Florida, but things have really changed today, and it’s a good quality of life. Mosquito control has been a big part of that. Not everybody comes here because we don’t have mosquitoes, but it’s kind of a prerequisite. If things were like they used to be, nobody would come to Florida. I just looked at the property values and this county, and they’ve gone up 450% in the last 20 years and this is coincides with really the last big thing that we did in mosquito control, where we started really broad scale larviciding with some new technology and we’re getting better every year. Floridians now have a quality of life that they never experienced before against mosquitoes. So the people come here, and they enjoy the natural beauty of Florida and all the amenities that we have, and don’t have to worry about mosquitoes and they come back, property values go up, tourism goes up. I know Governor DeSantis just sent out a press release just a few days ago. Last year was a record year in Florida for tourism. So we’re certainly a part of that winning formula, and we are working hard to keep it that way.”
The mosquito has actually been called the world’s deadliest animal.
Goodman said, “Right now, there’s over 3,500 species in the world, and we have about 85, 90 of them here in Florida, but worldwide, there’s three mosquitos that really account for most of the disease and deaths. That’s the Culex, the Aedes and the Anopheles, and we have those in plenty abundance here in Florida that we work hard to control, plus the other 80 some species, certainly can cause a lot of pain and misery for ruining evening events. So Florida Keys Mosquito Control, we’re working on all of them. Right now, last year, I think about around a million people in the world were killed by mosquitoes, and that number has continued to drop. In the early 1900s there were, like 16 million people died every year, just from malaria alone, and hundreds of those in Florida. So unfortunately, though, those numbers are starting to rise again, because mosquito borne diseases are on the rise worldwide, and certainly affecting Florida and a lot of the technologies that we used in the past to kill them, some of the better pesticides are no longer effective on some of these mosquitoes. So this is one of the reasons we’re constantly looking for new technologies to control these.”
New technologies really help control the mosquito population.
Goodman said, “There’s very few people that remember what mosquito control, what mosquitoes were like in Florida back when we had these wide scale epidemics regularly of malaria and yellow fever. People couldn’t go out of their homes after dark because they would be attacked by just hordes of mosquitoes and most of the seaside communities in Florida were closed in the summertime. So people don’t remember that. I know people have told me we had a bad year two years ago, because, like, I’ve been bitten three times. That was how a lot of people think mosquito control has improved, but they don’t realize. They don’t remember how bad it was, and these mosquitoes are still here. We’re a foundation, and different than a foundation for a home. You build it once, and that’s done. The foundation that mosquito control bills for this economy, we have to rebuild it every day because one mosquito can produce billions of mosquitoes in its lifetime, just in the summer time here in in Florida, and without mosquito control for a couple of weeks, you’d see what it was like in the 1950s, a few more weeks in the 1920s. So these mosquitoes can come back quickly and all the diseases. So mosquito control is out there every day, working to keep these numbers low and it’s very effective, and it’s why Florida really is number one in the US and number one in the world in mosquito control. There’s really not a close second to us. When you look at Florida and you look at the geography and where we are on the shorelines, it’s a paradise for both man and mosquito and so we have to be number one. Our residents and our visitors really demand and deserve it and we work hard to deliver it.”
Does mosquito control get state funding?
Goodman said, “Mosquito control in the state of Florida is really a county function. It’s left up to each county. We’re supported mostly by ad valorem taxes at the county level. The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, we’re a special, independent, special taxing district, and there’s about 15 of us that are this way in the state of Florida for mosquito control. The rest, 40-some are county operations. They are under the control of the Board of County Commissioners. In our case, we have a special board like the one that I’m on here in the Florida Keys, and we have a singular focus for mosquito control, whereas the county, they have a lot of different cost centers that they have to deal with, a lot of problems, but we are singularly focused on mosquitoes. If you look at the state of Florida and the 15 independent mosquito control districts around the state, and these are the ones where really the big mosquito problems have been like in the Keys, these independent districts have really become the technical centers of mosquito control in the state of Florida. If you look at the innovations that have happened over the last 70 years in mosquito control, almost every one of the major ones and minor ones have either been by for or with one of these special districts in Florida. This is where new technology is developed. This is where the scientists are and through the Florida Mosquito Control Association, the overriding group that binds us together. That’s where we relay information, transfer technology that these independent districts have developed, and through technical papers and technical presentations at the FMCA, we give everybody in the state of Florida a chance to look at all of this, and so everybody can really stay up to date in the state of Florida, on mosquito control. Not everybody has to have all of the research facilities that these independent districts have. So we work together as a good team, and it really works for the state of Florida, like I say we’re number one. There’s really no one else that’s even close to what we can do here in the state of Florida and the world benefits from it. All this technology that’s used in the world, a lot, most of it was developed here in Florida.”
Several weeks ago, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District was presented an award from Ocean Reef Community Association for their partnership.
Goodman said, “They’ve told me they recognize it’s not that been that many years ago that they were only open in the summertime, and now their hotels and restaurants are open year round and it’s been a real economic boom. That area of the Florida Keys is one of the most difficult for controlling mosquitoes because some of the federal like Crocodile Lake and John Pennekamp, some of these areas up there, where we cannot really do any mosquito control at all and of course, the Everglades, which we can’t control. There’s a lot of mosquitoes coming in, but things that we’ve done for them or with them over the past few years, have really improved that situation. They certainly appreciate what we do, and we certainly appreciate working with them. All of Monroe County has been very supportive of mosquito control, so we certainly appreciate the partnership we have with the community as well.”