Tuesday morning during Tarrant County Commissioner’s Court, the Director of Public Health expressed concern about the number of mosquitoes carrying the West Nile virus.
“The first thing I worry about is mosquito activity. Sure, the positivity rate for mosquitoes has been pretty high in Tarrant County,” said Vinny Taneja, Tarrant County’s Director of Public Health. “We hit a high of nearly 60 percent of mosquito pools that were positive (results) in northeast Tarrant County, for the entire province was 40 percent positive.”
He said the province has “fallen” its ground-spraying efforts for up to three nights in a row around the radius of one mile.
The county said the best time to spray is in the evening when mosquitoes are on the run. Taneja said it is when the chemical is most effective, but they have to wait until late at night to spit when people are not.
Taneja said they have found that mosquitoes rest late at night, which poses a problem in the effectiveness of the chemical. The other problem is the lack of range it has chemically.
“The problem is, when the trucks come around, they do spray on a street basis and you have the building structure of your house in the way,” Taneja said. “What we find, however, is, a lot of people who live in private backyards that are backed up by a beamline or backed up by a creek, and this chemical the way it is applied, get there. maybe not. ”
The province considers air spraying as a way to combat mosquitoes from the air to reach these places. Taneja said another chemical is used and helps kill mosquitoes in vegetation.
“It’s a little heavier powdery substance, if you will, that will sink to the ground, but it has very good effectiveness, and if you do an aerial application, you can cover all those areas that a truck cannot reach,” he explained.
Taneja said the province is doing its due diligence to explore the option.
“When you have spraying on air and ground, it’s better efficiency. Both have their values both their challenges, so you have to apply all the tools to get the job done,” Taneja said.
He said they are thinking about the environment and worried about how the chemical could affect bees.
“When and if that conversation happens, we would keep all beekeepers busy in the area, just to make sure we understand where their businesses are, give them instructions on how to protect their beehive, or as many times as we can prevent we would avoid the area.That all these efforts are part of our due diligence package that I am talking about, make sure we tell all our partners that if this happens, how do we make it safe? for everyone, “said Taneja.
The province is in the process of reaching out to city officials in the province, and is considering how much it would cost.
At Tuesday’s meeting, he told the court that they had held talks with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Texas Department of State Health Services about the option.
He said the idea is still too early.
A Tarrant County Public Health Department spokesman said it was unknown when and if the county had used this method before. If they did, the province said it was at least a decade ago.
The last time an airstrike occurred in North Texas was in 2012 in Dallas County.
Tenaja, meanwhile, said she was asking all of her city partners and individuals to help on their own with muscle reduction, including normal sprays. He thinks it works, but says the numbers are still high.
“In the Northeast we are below 50% positivity figures and in the rest of the province about 35 percent, but we are still pretty high and it will remain high for a long time,” Tenaja said.
He said it translates into infected mosquitoes that bite humans and that they “clean up” human cases.
“Last week when I spoke to the Commissioner’s court, we had only two cases and one was a death, well, today we have nine cases, seven of which came within a period of two days, yesterday and today, so that’s about us starting and upward trend, ”he said.
Taneja said she sees more severe cases versus mild and believes that people who have a symptom of a fever think they have COVID-19. He said people might get tested, get negative results then stay home. Taneja is worried that there may be underreporting.
Public health officials remind people to remove standing water, limit time outdoors at night, and when you need to be outside, wear long sleeves and insects.
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