Other concerns
concern, state health officials said Miami-Dade reported 241 cases last year, Palm Beach eight and Broward one.
Miami-Dade is the only place in the state this year to havenewlocal transmission cases, with four. It got its first reported local case of the virus in July last year.
The presence of the local Zika virus last year led to transmission warnings being issued for four MiamiDade communities, including the Wynwood art district and on Miami Beach, and it threatened severe damage to the region’s tourist economy.
The pesky biters causing most of the concern earlier this month were invaders from the salt marshes of the Everglades. Officials said their bite may irritate, but they don’t pose the threat of disease.
Gayle Love, spokeswoman for Miami-Dade County’s Solid Waste Management Department, which oversees the county’s mosquito control efforts, said the salt marsh variety can travel great distances and are “very aggressive biters,” but they’re really nothing more than a “tremendous nuisance mosquito.”
There are more than 40 species of mosquito in the region. The species that is getting special attention by mosquito eradicators is the Aedes aegypti. Unlike the salt marsh mosquito, the Aedes aegypti doesn’t travel far from where it is bred, and it can transmit diseases such as Zika, Dengue, Chikungunya and Yellow Fever.
It gravitates to urban areas and can breed in as little as a bottle cap full of standingwater.
The counties have two treatment regimens for attacking mosquitoes: larvicide, which kills mosquito larvae before they hatch, and adulticide, which is used to attack adult mosquitoes.
“The most effective way to go after them is when they’re in a larvae stage,” said Anh Ton, who oversees Broward’s mosquito-control efforts. “You want to go after them when they’re in one place.”
Broward has developed a new way of adapting the spraying of the larvicide from trucks and getting the same amount of coverage using half the chemicals, cutting costs in half. It plans to seek a patent for its invention.
Thetreatments are intensified in communities where an infected person resides.
Officials stress the chemicals are safe for humans. The adulticide sprayings are done at night when only mosquitoes are flying so that they don’t pose harm to other flying insects, bees, butterflies and birds, officials said. women can put around their yards in areas where water typically accumulates.
Many infected infants have been born with microcephaly, a condition that causes abnormally small heads and developmental defects.
The county has purchase a less expensive mosquito trap this year so that they can put out a lot more and get more neighborhoodspecific information on where mosquito-population problems are emerging with the assistance of volunteers.
Theyalso plan tohave the traps at all schools and have been training school custodians on howto monitor the traps and report what they find, Ton said.
While local officials try to stay on top of mosquito outbreaks, they’re often at the mercy of theweather.
Aerial spraying, or spraying fromtrucks, can be done only under certain wind conditions, roughly between 3 and 10 mph. Those wind conditions are strong enough to carry the spray into yards and containers where mosquitoes may be breeding, but not so strong that it carries it away to unintended areas.
Palm Beach County mosquito fighters, for instance, had to delay aerial spraying for at least a week after the heavy rains earlier this month, because of rainstorms, dead calm or too breezy conditions, the county’s mosquito control director, Ed Bradford, said. the host state, included more than 35 mayors.
“Diverse groups make better decisions. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do,” he said.
“In a very profound way, the cities have become the laboratories of democracy,” he said.
He said several issues have impactedmanyof the cities represented, regardless of whether they look more like a small townor a bustling metropolis.
“In the beginning this despicable [opioid] epidemic had a less violent delivery system,” he said, through prescriptions and not “armed gangs.”
“It’s gonna eat us all alive. We should have all acknowledged that we should have seen this before,” he said.
Broward County is one of the hardest-hit areas. Last year, opioidoverdoses killed 582 people, almost two a day, according to CraigMallak, the county’s chief medical examiner. He predicted the epidemic will getworse, with at least 1,000 deaths in 2017.
Clinton then shifted to clean energy, jobs, technology and the environment. And in closing, he circled back to his original point.
“I think you can help America get over some of the tribalism,” he told the mayors.
“You can do this. You are doing it, but you have to convince the people you are doing it with and for, that this is what America stands for.”
The conference started Friday and will run through Monday at the Fontainebleau.
bballou@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4188