Phil Goodman, Florida Keys Mosquito Control District 2 Commissioner, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on with the mosquitoes.
The rain and the floods make treating for the mosquitoes really important.
Goodman said, “We’ve got quite a lot of treating here. Right now the biggest thing we’ve had is the last few days we’ve had some really high tides, a lot of flooding, I think, yesterday, we treated 300 acres. Today, we still have about 1,000 acres that we need to treat. We are treating in Key West right now for the Aedes aegypti with the aerial larvicide mission. It’s a typical September for us. It’s very busy. We’ll be getting more rain, so mosquito control is going to be very busy the next six to eight weeks for sure.”
How are we doing with number of mosquitoes?
Goodman said, “Right now, the number, the counts, are pretty good. We’ve got in most areas, it’s under good control. The rain has come in such that we’ve been able to treat those areas very effectively. The Aedes aegypti numbers are also pretty low in most of the Keys right now. So we’re looking at a pretty good situation. We’re trying to stay ahead of it. As long as we don’t have a really long, prolonged weather event, we’re able to stay ahead of most of these, even with the high tides and with the rain. The problem for us is when you have four, five, six days of rain and wind where we can’t get up and treat because we have a narrow window that we can treat these mosquitoes in the larval stage, then we have to treat them as adult mosquitoes. We’ve been very, very successful this year, and we’ve had very few adulticide missions. This past month, we had a record of truck applied liquid larvicide missions. We had 39 in the month of August, and years ago, we had zero. This is some really new technology that’s come out with new spraying techniques that we’re able to use our trucks to spray the larvicide in addition to the helicopters, like the mission in Key West this morning. So these have been really big improvements that have helped us really significantly improve our control the last few years.”
What about mosquito borne diseases in Florida and the United States?
Goodman said, “Right now in Florida, in Monroe County, we’re doing very well. We had the three cases of Dengue back in June and we were able to get in and really treat those areas where those people lived. It was all in a similar area in the Upper Keys, and we’ve had no more transmission. So we are really proactive in this. We really hit these areas hard, where Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are increasing. So we’re doing pretty good right now, but we have had a couple of travel related cases come in. But Florida in general, this year, it looks like they’re going for another record as far as mosquito borne diseases in Florida, particularly Dengue fever. We’ve had nearly 600 cases so far in Florida this year, and almost half the counties in Florida have had Dengue fever and are under mosquito borne illness alerts or advisories from the health department, as well as others, about five other mosquito borne diseases that we’re seeing in Florida now, none in the Keys, none of the others in the Keys. West Nile virus, we’ve had some signs of the triple E and the St Louis encephalitis. We also have a new disease, the Oropouche virus, which has affected thousands of people in Cuba this year. It’s very similar to Dengue, and we’re starting to get a lot of travel related cases. I think we’re up to about 50 travel related cases in Florida, just in the last three weeks, most of them in Miami Dade. So this is another one that we’re looking out for. We’re aware of all these other diseases, but because of the types of mosquitoes we have here and also the geography, Dengue fever is by far the number one for us and the most likely. So that’s where we’re really putting most of our efforts. We’re aware of these others. We’re stay vigilant, but Dengue fever is the one that we’re likely to have here in the Florida Keys, so we’re pretty much on top of it. But it can happen anytime these travel related cases coming in, particularly from Central and South America, the Caribbean islands.”
This afternoon will be the final budget hearing for the mosquito control district.
Goodman said, “Certainly the public is invited and can speak. This year’s budget, we face all the same increases everyone else has faced this year and with the expenses, but our budget increase, we have the millages at the rollback level, but that will generate about 1.9 million more dollars for us this year which is needed. Of the $1.9 million, $1.2 million, we are adding to reserves to buy our fourth helicopter, which we hope to buy and have here in 2026. So this will complete our fleet. We’ve been putting money in reserves each year. We had about a 10 year plan to replace our aging fleet of aircraft, and we have one more to buy now, and this will be the last installment that we will need for that new helicopter. So that takes a big chunk out of it, and we have about $600,000 more in chemical costs next year to take up a big part of that as well. We had about a 15% increase in chemical costs itself. Plus we’re using more and more chemical particularly the larvicide. This is the one that really, really helped us in mosquito control here, and we’re finding more and more ways of using it to better control, both the Aedes aegypti mosquito and the salt marsh mosquitoes, so those two things take up the biggest part of the budget, plus the rest of it, we’re adding a new position next year. We haven’t added a new person in mosquito control in 15 years, but next year, we will be adding a new person, and it’ll be more of a public relations person to go out and more or less help educate the community on how they can help with the Aedes aegypti growth, most of this is in our backyards. We have about 50,000 residences and businesses in the Keys and our 40 inspectors can’t be at all of those every week, like you need to be in the height of the season. We have so many new visitors here and so many new residents in the Keys that we need to really increase our efforts to educate the community on what you can do in your property to help us control particularly the Aedes aegypti mosquito, because it’s really breeding around our homes. Every home site is a potential breeding site. So everyone needs to be vigilant to go out and dump the standing water and call mosquito control when you need our assistance. So we’ve had really great support from this community forever for mosquito control, but now with all the new residents, it’s time for us to raise the bar a little bit. So that’s really the main parts of our budget for this year.”
October 8 is the 75th anniversary celebration for the mosquito control district.
Goodman said, “The main festivities are between four and seven that day, and there’ll be a lot of announcements of this. Everyone’s invited. We hope people can come by and really see what a modern mosquito control is like. It’s been 75 years since the legislature passed the regulations authorizing what is now Florida Keys Mosquito Control District. So certainly a lot of changes have taken place in that time, and we’ve been able to put together a pretty good chronology of how things transpired over the years, and I think it’s quite interesting. A lot of this is on our website right now, but in this day people can tour, go through our labs, go to look at our aircraft, ask questions. We’ll have our specialists there to answer questions and really see what the commitment the Florida Keys has made to controlling mosquitoes, because the CDC has told us several years ago of the increased threat of mosquito borne disease. So we’ve really changed from a nuisance control to really including Disease Control, which is a big part of our operation now, which didn’t exist 12 years ago. So a lot of things have changed, and we’ve changed with it. We remain one of the top mosquito control districts in the world, actually, and very proud of what we got. I hope people can come by and really see because we do need community involvement more and more to help us, looking on your properties to be sure that you’re not breeding mosquitoes. So that’s a big focus for this year.”
The mosquito control district has also partnered with the health department.
Goodman said, “The local health department here has really been a great partner for us. We work closely together, because we are all in this together, trying to achieve the same goal and in the end, we had some speakers, some people from the health department really present at a recent meeting of mosquito control. So we work closely with them and they’ll be coming by also soon. They want a plant tour of our operation there to see so that they can really understand a lot but more about some of the newer things that we’re doing as well. So a very important partner for us.”
On October 5, the county will have another tire recycling day.
Goodman said, “It’ll be at all the Key Largo, the Long Key and the Cudjoe transfer stations. We work with them. We also have tire reclaim day every year. So this is a chance to turn in your automobile tires without a charge. If people keep these around their homes, they are just terrific attractors for mosquito breeding. So we try very hard to keep those out of the community. So if you have tires, look for that on October 5 and participate in that and that would help everyone.”