Phil Goodman, Commissioner for District 2 and board chair of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about mosquitos.
What does the rain mean for the mosquitos?
Goodman said, “Before last night, we had had between a half and one inch in the Keys. We had about two inches in Ocean Reef two days ago. So we’ve been spraying, and we’ve been checking. We did find some mosquitoes in Ramrod Key and we did some aerial spraying there of about 40 acres yesterday. But this rain last night, this will certainly increase the activity of mosquitos. So we’ll be busy. We’ve finished all of our scheduled maintenance for the off season. So we’re ready to go for the season whenever it cranks up, which should be very soon.”
The good news is there are currently no locally transmitted mosquito borne diseases.
Goodman said, “We’ve been able to keep out dengue fever and chikungunya, which we’ve been seeing really travel related cases coming into a lot of South Florida, particularly Miami. Over the last really number of years, we’ve kept them out of here in the Keys, but it’s something we’re continuing to look at. We did have two since we spoke last, two travel related cases of Chikungunya in Key West. This is the first Chikungunya that we’ve had here for many years. These diseases really work on five to 10 year cycles. Typically, dengue fever has been a little bit different where it’s been really locally transmitting every year in Florida for the last 10 years or more. But chikungunya is kind of on that five to 10 year cycle, and it’s back now in a big way, a lot of epidemics all throughout South and Central America, a lot in Asia as well, particularly we’ve seen in the Caribbean in Cuba.”
There were two travel related cases of chikungunya in Key West last month.
Goodman said, “They were both from Cuba. Both people came in and they got sick when they were here. They were bitten in Cuba. Once the health department alerts us that we have a travel related case, we know the neighborhood. We go in there, and we do real extensive treating for several days, really, to try to be sure there’s no Aedes aegypti left in that neighborhood to bite this individual. Now, usually, the individual that’s sick is usually staying inside. Some of them may be hospitalized, but when they’re viremic, they are able to transmit this disease if they are bitten by a local Aedes aegypti mosquito. So we work hard to keep those numbers really low, particularly if there’s a case of a travel related illness in the neighborhood. And so far, this has really worked and this is starting to work statewide. We’ve had virtually thousands of travel related cases of Dengue fever and chikungunya the last years coming into Florida, but because of Florida’s mosquito control, in every county, they do something similar and there is local transmission in some areas, but it’s really low. You don’t have the widespread epidemics that we used to have in Florida back before mosquito control, where you could have thousands of people, or hundreds of thousands of people who are infected. Those days are gone because of mosquito control, but we still have to really remain vigilant, because these diseases are still in the world, particularly in the tropics and subtropical areas, and these people are traveling, like in Brazil, which has always had dengue and chikungunya disease locally transmitting. They had about 16 million cases two years ago, thousands of deaths, and about eight to nine jumbo jets a day coming into Miami alone. So that’s one disease, one country, one mosquito, coming into one airport in Florida. Our number one job is to do everything we can to keep the community safe. And so far here in the Florida Keys, we’ve been very successful at it. The problem happens when people don’t go to the doctor when they’re sick, so they have these diseases, and we’re not able to go in those neighborhoods and really treat like this, and then you can have more widespread local transmission, but so far, we’ve been able to keep this out of the Keys.”
What is being done and planned for 2026 to address those local transmissions in the Keys?
Goodman said, “We’re really concerned this year about chikungunya, because it has, really, it’s kind of replaced Dengue in a lot of countries, or slowly replacing it. But we’re seeing widespread epidemics all throughout Asia, Central and South America. So people are coming here, and this is the Aedes aegypti, the same mosquito, really the only disease carrying mosquito in the Keys that we’re most concerned with, because of the high probability of getting Dengue fever and those diseases and some of the better chemicals that we use, the mosquito, this particular mosquito is becoming resistant to, so we know, long term, we have to have some different products. We’ve been looking at sterile insect technique now for 20 years. This year, we are running again with Wolbachia. We have three 20 acre sites. This year, in the Middle Keys. Last year we were in the Upper Keys running continuous, more trials with this. So we’ll be running that this year. And it’s more or less really trying to figure out exactly how best to use this product before we put it into our regular rotation. We think these products are going to be part of our long term in our arsenal against these diseases, but we have a lot of testing to do to find out exactly how best to use it. So we’ll be using it this year in the Middle Keys in three sites, and we’ll have three control areas, so we’ll know more.”
Last year was a good year for Wolbachia.
Goodman said, “But last year was in the Upper Keys, and we had such a large number of salt marsh mosquitoes in the Upper Keys, particularly coming from the Everglades, that we had to do a lot more adulticiding treatments up there last year, and I think this kind of skewed our numbers a little bit. So we want to be sure we get accurate numbers. That’s why we’re moving down to the Middle Keys this year, so that’s one thing that we’re doing. There’s about six counties in Florida that this year that will also be doing work with these sterile insect techniques. There’s a new product, a new chemical product, that was approved by the EPA last year, the first one approved for specifically adult mosquitoes in over 50 years. And we have approved it for use here as well. So we’ll be starting to use it in some of our trucks for the adulticide treatment of the Aedes aegypti all over the Keys this year. It’ll probably start soon. This also gives us a third product to use, because we have to rotate products that are used for adulticide. And this will give us a third one to use, sometimes we almost run to our limits on how many times we can use these products per year in a neighborhood. We’re restricted by that. And all these restrictions are not for people. These products are safe for people, but the endangered species. All of the regulations that we have really are to help preserve some of the endangered species, particularly in a lot of the protected lands that we have here in the Keys. So we have a good plan this year, hopefully we will be able to continue to keep these diseases under control and also really control the salt marsh mosquito this year. We’ve done some things there that should be improved, some of the shortcomings that we had last year and some of the new things that we found that we needed to to start doing. And so we’re hopeful that this year is going to be a better mosquito season. It should be starting soon.”
The March meeting of the Board of Commissioners for the mosquito control district is today.
Goodman said, “We’ll have our audit committee meeting, and we’ll have several other meetings, plus our regular meeting, but we also starting off this morning with a workshop that I think is very interesting where we’re very serious, take serious, our impact that we have on the economy of Florida. In addition to protecting the people for public health and our comfort, if we do those jobs, the economy of Florida continues to grow because the economy of Florida has grown since mosquito control. We’ve invited our real estate partners, everybody that’s in the Florida Keys is a partner or a stakeholder with us that we work for. But for the economy, we’ve identified several of the real big organizations that impact our economy, like the Board of Realtors, the realtors, that’s a huge segment of our economy. And we’ve invited them today to a workshop, to tour our facilities, go through our research center. We will be giving presentations to them, what we’re doing, and really listening to them. Also, what can we do for them? Because they’re out there in the real estate and a lot of their clients are people from out of state and that have never seen mosquito control like we have here in the Florida Keys. So education becomes a big part of what we do in the Florida Keys for mosquito control, because if you’re coming in from other states, maybe no mosquito control at all, are quite different from what we have here. And so it’s a lot of educating to do. The realtors are really the first, they’re first contact. So I think there’s a lot to be gained from it. Next month, we’ll do the same thing. We’ll have our county mayor in, and she will bring the tourist development council people in. So we’ll be doing the same thing, because the tourist industry is also huge here, and we want to be sure we’re listening to these stakeholders, and maybe there are some things that we can do to help them help our economy as well. Our number one job is controlling the mosquitoes, which, if we do that, the best we can, that also helps our economy. So a lot of things going on today. I think this will be a very good eye opening meeting for everyone.”
The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District will have an open house on April 18th at the Marathon facility.
Goodman said, “Last year we had an open house, and we had great participation. I think people will be delighted to see what their mosquito control is doing, because we’ll have a lot of things set up inside our facility there, going through our research department, have a lot of tables set up. The children really enjoyed it as well. And I think when people leave, they’re realizing we do have a world class mosquito control here. We have to have one. We live in the tropical climate where if you didn’t have mosquito control, you really couldn’t live here like we do today. So I mean, we’re important part of the community, and we want the community to understand what we’re doing, because there’s a lot of things that they can do to help us, particularly with the mosquitoes that carry diseases, because we breed them around our home, and a lot of the homeowners can do a lot of things to to help mosquito control. We can’t be at every home every week. So I think this is a real education thing. So we really invite the entire community to come visit us on April the 18th, from 10 o’clock in the morning till two o’clock in the afternoon at our Marathon headquarters.”
For more information, click here: https://www.keysmosquito.org/