Backyard mosquito spraying booms, but may be too deadly

It’s an increasingly familiar sight in U.S. cities and suburbs: A van pulls up to the curb. Workers wearing gloves, masks and other protective gear strap on backpack-type mechanisms with plastic hoses, similar to leaf blowers.

Revving up the motors, they drench trees, bushes and even house walls with pesticides targeting an age-old menace: mosquitoes.

The winged, spindly-legged bloodsuckers have long been the bane of backyard barbecues and, in tropical nations, carriers of serious disease. Now, with climate change widening the insect’s range and lengthening its prime season, more Americans are resorting to the booming industry of professional yard spraying.

“If you like to be outside, it certainly makes it more pleasant not to be swatting mosquitos and worrying about all the issues,” said Marty Marino, a recent customer in Michigan’s Cascade Township, a bedroom community near Grand Rapids.

But the chemical bombardment is beginning to worry scientists who fear over-use of pesticides is harming pollinators and worsening a growing threat to birds that eat insects.

“The materials these companies spray kill all bugs,” said Lynn Goldman, an environmental health professor at George Washington University and former assistant administrator for toxic substances at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“That includes bees, butterflies and all kinds of beneficial bugs that maybe people don’t love but should,” Goldman said. “It’s not good to have this kind of indiscriminate killing, messing up the whole ecosystem.”