Sprayer, bloated welts, citronella. It is mosquito season.
And in a typical year, the Delaware County Health Department in Ohio would put up more than 90 mosquito traps per week – black tubs of standing water with nets designed to catch small insects.
But this year, due to COVID-19, the mosquitoes will fly free.
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The coronavirus has alienated employees, so they haven’t set a trap yet this year, according to Dustin Kent, program manager for the residential services unit. Even if they had time, the state laboratory that would normally test insects for viruses infecting humans cannot take the samples because it is also too busy with COVID-19.
That means the surrounding community, just north of Columbus, Ohio, has to wait until life-threatening mosquito-borne diseases, such as the West Nile, make humans sick to find out if insects transmit disease.
“It is frustrating to know that we can do a more preventive approach,” Kent said. “But we are caught reacting.”
In Washtenaw County, Michigan, mosquito samples are not collected because the health department did not have the staff or the ability to hire and train summer interns who would normally do the work. At the COVID-19 hot spot in Houston, Texas, a third of mosquito control personnel are working at a COVID call center, storing warehouses and preparing coronavirus test materials. And across Florida, public health officials were unable to test chicken blood for exposure to mosquito-borne viruses (the insects also bit chickens, so they can serve as warning signs) in the state lab. overwhelmed until mid-June, a chore that usually begins in the spring.
Monitoring and killing mosquitoes is a key public health task used to curb the spread of deadly diseases. In recent years, major mosquito-borne illnesses have killed about 200 people annually in the US But those low numbers are due in part to efforts by public health departments to keep the spread at bay, unlike from other countries where hundreds of thousands are sick and die every year
“Mosquitoes are the biggest nuisance and pest on this planet. Undoubtedly, ”said Ary Faraji, president of the American Mosquito Control Association, a nonprofit organization that supports public mosquito control agencies. “They are responsible for more deaths than any other organism on this planet, including humans.”
This is physical work that cannot be done by telecommuting from home. Keeping track of mosquitoes and the diseases they carry requires setting traps and looking for patios and commercial lots. Public health workers patrol irrigation ditches and dump backyard tires, plastic bins, and trash that may contain standing water where mosquitoes breed.
Across the United States, more than half of public health departments fight mosquitoes. In some states, including Florida and California, specific departments are dedicated to tracking and preventing its spread. The goal is to find infected mosquito populations and kill them before they reach humans, or at least warn the community of their presence, as mosquito-borne epidemics occur more frequently nationwide as temperatures rise.
But a joint investigation published this month by KHN and The Associated Press detailed how US state and local public health departments have been hungry for decades, leaving them underfunded and without adequate resources to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. , much less the other job like the mosquito control that they have the task of handling at the same time. More than 38,000 public health worker jobs have been lost since 2008. Per capita spending in local health departments has decreased by 18% since 2010.
So as public health workers rush to summon a sufficient workforce to tackle a pandemic that occurs once in a generation, they are being removed from normal mosquito-related tasks. Staff shortages are leaving many localities, especially those without separate and dedicated control districts, flying blind to possible mosquito threats.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stepped in to help and are now conducting mosquito tests for at least nine states, including Florida, Arizona and the Carolinas, said Roxanne Connelly, leader of the entomology and ecology team for the National Center. for CDC Emerging and Zoonotic. Infectious diseases, as well as evaluating human blood samples for mosquito-borne diseases in 40 states. Concerned about the disruptions, the CDC released a policy brief with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, highlighting that mosquito prevention and spraying insecticides was an essential service that must continue even in a national health emergency.
“Mosquitoes will continue to exist and will continue to cause disease, no matter what type of pandemic is occurring,” Connelly said.
Even with limited tests to measure the problem and relatively low rates of illness so far this year, there are worrying signs. Fourteen people in the Florida Keys have contracted locally acquired dengue, which can cause fever, severe body aches, and vomiting. Massachusetts has found its first eastern equine encephalitis mosquito, which kills about a third of infected people, according to the CDC. West Nile Virus has been found in mosquitoes, birds, or other species in at least 18 states and has infected people in nine.
“This year is more of a wild card, we are not receiving the surveillance we normally receive,” said David Brown, the technical adviser to the American Mosquito Control Association.
Flu-like symptoms of diseases like West Nile (fever, body aches) are of particular concern to Nina Dacko, who oversees the Tarrant County Public Health mosquito control program in Fort Worth, Texas.
“I wonder what cases will be lost, as everyone will wait for COVID and then move forward when they test negative,” he said.
Budget cuts come in waves as the tax shortage affects local health departments. Three municipalities in Texas, including Watauga, Saginaw and Lake Worth, have not sent mosquitoes for testing this year – they don’t have time or they have lost staff and money due to COVID-19 income shortages, Dacko said.
Smaller health departments and control programs appear to be bearing the brunt of the problems, North Carolina state public health entomologist Michael Doyle said in an email, as they have fewer staff to fight the coronavirus. Some larger departments and programs, such as those covering Houston, the Central Valley of California, or Maricopa County, Arizona, say they have been able to operate close to normal.
And while public health officials say small outdoor gatherings are safer when it comes to avoiding exposure to the coronavirus, some are concerned that the risk of mosquito-borne illness may increase.
“Everyone knows if you’re outdoors, that’s where you’re really going to expose yourself,” said Chelsea Gridley-Smith, director of environmental health for the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
Laboratory crunches may be increasing that risk. Local governments often rely on the same public health laboratories to assess whether mosquitoes transmit diseases such as West Nile, Dengue, or eastern equine encephalitis that they do to screen humans for infectious diseases, such as COVID-19. . As a result, much of the country is behind weeks where they would normally be testing mosquitoes for the presence of dangerous diseases, Brown said.
Stopping mosquitoes requires obtaining information in real time. If a mosquito is carrying the West Nile virus, “it wants to know today, not in two weeks,” Brown said.
When the COVID pandemic struck Salt Lake City, which has its own laboratories for testing mosquitoes, the mosquito department shared its materials with laboratories that test for COVID-19 and donated N95 masks that its staff use when spraying chemicals to kill mosquitoes, according to Faraji, who is also the executive director of the Salt Lake City Mosquito Reduction District. Utah has done about 5% of the mosquito tests it would normally do at this time, he said.
“Our underlying concern is that one public health emergency does not lead to another,” Faraji said.
According to Gridley-Smith, any great solution to the hole in the nation’s current mosquito network will require some cash, to allow for dedicated staffing, rather than waiting for public health workers to juggle it along with many other programs.
The Southern Nevada Health District, which includes Las Vegas, does not have a department dedicated to mosquitoes. From April to October, workers there catch, collect and test mosquitoes for viruses, said Vivek Raman, who oversees the efforts. The rest of the year, the same team is responsible for the sanitation of all the hotels and mobile home parks in the area, including those located on the strip of the casino. But restaurant inspections, permits, and sanitation help pay your way.
“One of the challenges with mosquitoes is that they don’t pay the permit fees,” he said.
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Several bills to support mosquito control efforts, including the Mosquito Reduction Strengthening Act for Safety and Health, have been passed by Congress with bipartisan support in recent years, but have not been funded.
For CDC’s Connelly, a lack of dollars is just another part of the explosive nature of funding for health departments and mosquito control programs nationwide. Cash infusions after battles with Zika or mosquito-borne hurricanes are not enough to fully keep the programs robust, he said, and they often have to start again when the next crisis hits.
Raman and his colleagues had plans this year to work with the CDC on a project to reduce the population of Aedes Aegypti, a species of invasive mosquito that can carry a variety of deadly viruses, including Zika, and which first appeared in the southern Nevada. 2017. That project is on hold until next year.
