Phil Goodman, Commissioner for District 2 of the Mosquito Control District, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s been going on with the mosquitos.
What’s been happening recently?
Goodman said, “Right now we’re into more of a normal weather pattern for the Keys, and a lot of rain we’ve had recently, a lot of westerly wind in the Upper Keys. We’ve had a super high tide right now at the super moon that we’re having, so mosquito control has been quite busy. The numbers are been relatively good for the nuisance mosquitoes in the Keys, where we had four fog truck missions last night in the Upper Keys mainly for the nuisance mosquito. We’re continuing to work on the Aedes aegypti, the counts for that mosquito also have been relatively low. Still, a lot of rain, though, we had a number of liquid larvicide missions yesterday in various parts of the keys. We’re still very busy the mosquito control. Mosquito counts right now seem to be relatively under good control, but we’re continuing to stay busy and to try to keep this community safe and comfortable.”
What about Dengue fever?
Goodman said, “We had three local cases back in June in the Upper Keys. That’s all we’ve had. Those people have for a long time now, been completely well. We’re continuing to treat heavily in those areas, as well as other areas where we see Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. We haven’t had any further outbreak in South Florida. We’ve got five counties now that that have reported Dengue fever and are under the state mosquito borne disease alert still mostly travel related, coming in from Cuba, Brazil, Columbia, some Puerto Rico. So we’re having a lot of introduction from that, and then a lot of local transmission, particularly still in the Miami-Dade, Broward area, they’ve had a lot of dengue fever. It’s still with us. We’re staying very vigilant here in the Keys. So far, we’ve been able to not have additional transmission where we had it, but it’s still growing, and I know last week, I guess, record numbers for this year in Miami- Dade, for the number of introductions. So it’s continuing to grow and will grow for the next several months. Hopefully we can, we can hold it with three. But with travel related cases, people coming in, you just can’t control this. The only way you can control this is to keep the numbers of the Aedes aegypti down, and we’re working as hard as we can to keep those numbers down, and we will continue.”
Are there other options to controlling mosquitos?
Goodman said, “It is what is called sterile insect technique. It’s a little bit misleading, but all of them really are dependent on releasing male mosquitoes into the wild and these mosquitoes are sterile to some extent, and they mate with the wild female, and they’re no offspring. So the population of the mosquito collapses. There’s three technologies right now. One is and they all three have different ways of imparting sterility into the male mosquito. One is irradiation, which Lee County has kind of been the leader in this. They’ve been working on this now for several years, and with some pretty good successes. The Wolbachia project, which uses a bacteria, the Wolbachia bacteria, to impart sterility. We’ve run trials with it, and we are ready to run more. We will be doing some work a little bit later this year with some of those mosquitoes. And then the Oxitec project, which uses genetic engineering to impart sterility. This is the one that we looked at the most. They the other two you release from adult males. The Oxitec, you start with the egg, which for us, has some advantages. But right now, the EPA has determined all of them to be safe, and all of them have been determined to be effective. What we’re wanting to do now is to evaluate all of them to see which is the most effective for our particular situation here in the Florida Keys. The Aedes aegypti mosquito and the dengue virus, there’s really no good, reliable vaccine at this time that everyone can take. There’s no therapeutic treatments for the disease. The only way to control the virus is to control the mosquito, and it’s become resistant to some of the better pesticides we use. So these new technologies, I think, are really important to have in our tool box to use in the future. So we won’t be able to do much this year with them, because neither one of them are ready. We’re doing a little bit of benchmarking with the irradiation and later this year, with Wolbachia. Hopefully next year, the Oxitec will be approved by the EPA. So I think in the future, we will have some new technologies. But we’re really anxious to get started to see how these can really work here in the Florida Keys.”
A new disease that has come into the Keys is called Oropouche fever.
Goodman explained, “There’s probably 20 or more mosquito borne diseases that medical researchers know about that never really have shown up in the population. One of them, a good example was Zika. It had been discovered since the 1950s but really just made a debut big time a few years ago. This Oropouche is similar. It was first found in 1955 in Trinidad and Tobago on the Oropouche River, but really, it’s only started spreading this year, and it’s really, it’s about 8,000 cases in Colombia and Brazil and Cuba, mainly. There have been several deaths, and there have been 20 cases in Florida. These are all travel related cases that have been introduced, really in the last three weeks, there were nine new cases this past week. So it’s growing in Florida. The interesting thing about this that it is transmitted by midges, which we call No-See-Ums. It’s the first disease that I’ve seen that is transmitted by No-See-Ums, which could really change the way mosquito control is done in Florida. Now, the particular No-See-Um that carries this disease is not currently in the Florida Keys. We’ve never found it here, but there is a mosquito that also transmit this disease, which we do have here. The No-See-Ums that transmitted is widely available throughout Florida, but just not here in in the Florida Keys. So it’s something that we are continuing to look at, because it is new, and there have been some deaths with this. It’s a similar disease as being a fever, as far as the symptoms. So we’re being very vigilant. It’s not something that we think we’re going to have problems with here in the Keys, but something that right now Florida is really keeping a close eye on the with the Department of Health.”
How can No-See-Ums be controlled?
Goodman said, “They are controlled with our normal pesticides, however, and maybe they and they’re killed more or less as a secondary kill. We go out to spray mosquitoes with adulticides, if there are No-See-Ums there, they usually are killed with the permethrin and with the other pesticides. However, these No-See-Ums, they breed every day, everywhere. To really control them, you would need to be in every neighborhood at least three or four times a week in the Keys just to spray, and then you’d be spraying so much that the mosquito population would become quickly more resistant than they are now to these pesticides. So it’s kind of a no win situation. We never really went after the No-See-Ums. We can’t really by regulation, because they never carry disease. So this Oropouche could change the way mosquito control is conducted, at least in some areas. So we’re continuing to look for it.”
Today is the monthly commission meeting for the Mosquito Control District, where the budget will be discussed.
Goodman said, “We’ll have our last budget workshop, which will start around one o’clock today in Marathon and what we’re looking at now, we don’t finalize our budget until September. What we’re looking at now is we, we will be increasing taxes about $1.8 million. About $1.2 million of that still going back into building reserves to buy our fourth helicopter, which we hope we’ll have enough money year after next to purchase. So this is still a big ticket item for us. We’re also seeing chemical cost next year, we expect about $800,000 of chemical increase mainly for the Aedes aegypti mosquito. We have a completely different chemical system for treating Aedes aegypti. The regular systems just don’t work on them. So it’s likely it’s got two mosquito controls out there. So the chemical cost on that is continuing to rise. Plus we will be adding a new person to our staff next year, and this person will be more or less a person to stay in the schools and to do public education. We’re seeing so many new people here in the Florida Keys, new residents. They’re coming from areas that really don’t know much about mosquito control. They don’t understand what we’re doing. Aedes aegypti right now is mainly breeding in our businesses and at our residences. There are over 50,000 of those in this community, and we can’t be at all of those places all the time. So we really are making a big push to get public awareness for this mosquito more than ever, because we know that Aedes aegypti and dengue fever, it’s going to be with us for quite some time. So we want to really continue to to prepare for it and most of this budget is in preparation for that. This mosquito breeds around our homes. It feeds off of the blood of humans. It prefers humans, so it’s going to stay real near our homes. So, in mosquito control, we do a really good job treating the more than 1,000 breeding sites throughout the county, large breeding sites in areas, but when it comes down to our homes, people here really need to be more cognizant of breeding mosquitoes on your property. We’ll be making a big effort, but we ask people to please go around your property at least once a week, dump out your standing water, and if you see mosquitoes, please call mosquito control or go to our website or go to our app and let us know. We’ll have an inspector out there, usually the same day to see what we can do to help you, so that that’s very important, and I think it will continue to be important.”