Sept. 16, 204
By VIRGINIA SMITH
Staff Writer
DAYTONA BEACH -- Nobody profits from a hurricane like a mosquito.
Did you know? The name mosquito, the pesky insect we love to hate, has roots in several Latin-based languages. Musca is the Latin word for fly. The word is also related to musket - a variation of a French word rooted in an Italian word meaning "small artillery piece." Moschetta means "little fly" as well as "bolt from a crossbow." Some linguists believe the term appropriate because both the artillery piece and the insect fly, buzz and sting.
of the English Language High winds ground pesticide-spraying helicopters. Heavy rains and high tides penetrate the earth, soaking eggs that have waited weeks or months for just the right conditions to hatch.
Ditches get clogged with trees, keeping mosquito-eating minnows from their prey. The summer heat speeds up the life cycle from egg to adult, and everywhere are new breeding ponds, new mates, new opportunities.
And for mosquito control officers, new headaches. A sentinel chicken in Edgewater tested positive last week for West Nile virus -- which hadn't been seen here since January. Meanwhile, a bumper crop of mosquitoes is stretching the agency thin.
"Basically, Frances hatched the children of Charley," said Jonas Stewart, director of the East Volusia Mosquito Control District. "And the children of Frances are hatching now."
Not only are there far more mosquitoes to deal with, said Stewart, there's more exposure to them as people without air conditioning leave doors open, and work outdoors fixing and clearing.
More than 120 citizens had called the agency's offices by lunchtime Tuesday -- double the number who call on a buggy summer day. Staff assistant Sharon DiFruscio carefully logged every complaint into a white book.
A few employees had visible bags under their eyes. "Everybody's pretty well ragged out," said administrator Don Emminger.
"Everyone wants a helicopter," said supervisor Cheryl Crozier. But the district has only two -- and one's doing double duty in Flagler County, where a pilot died when his craft crashed last month.
Fogging trucks, said Crozier, can only drive about 20 mph. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has offered to do some aerial spraying over Volusia, but has not yet come through.
So what's someone like Janet Bassi to do?
Bassi, a new Floridian who moved from Virginia last Friday, thought the new lake in her Ormond Beach yard, a gift from Frances, was the likely source of the biting swarm outside. "My husband was here getting eaten alive," she said. "They're just terrible -- they're just everywhere."
Bassi called Mosquito Control, and got put on the log -- but in the meantime, said Stewart, she should invest in insecticidal products, many of which can be dropped in standing water.
Stewart ordered thousands of packets of one larvicide, called "Pre-Strike," and will begin distributing them for free Friday through county health department offices. Until then, he said, he's hoping the public will buy an arsenal of insecticides at hardware, home supply, and even pet stores.
"A lot of these mosquito species are short fliers, so what you do on your property will make a big difference," he said. The best anti-mosquito products, he said, contain chemicals called permethin and methoprene, or bacteria-based biological insecticides.
"Our best efforts will do something," sad Stewart "but not enough."
Doing enough is essential with not only a bumper crop of mosquitoes, but also the threat of West Nile Virus looming closer.
Emminger said that after two human cases in Brevard County this year, officials had feared the disease would spread north.
Whether more mosquitoes will necessarily make things worse, he said, was not an easy question to answer.
"There's not necessarily a correlation between the number of mosquitoes and the number of cases," he said. "You need a disease reservoir in the local bird population. We did not have that, to our knowledge, before last week."
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