So I’m reading that four northern counties will undergo aerial spraying for West Nile virus beginning Monday and I couldn’t help but wonder how this came about so quickly.  Then I hop over to sacbee.com and check out an article about two new cases of West Nile being discovered this week.

From the Sac Bee article:

District officials were sharply criticized in 2005 when, during a West Nile epidemic, they began aerial spraying in Sacramento and Yolo counties with little public notice. As a result, the district initiated an intensive awareness campaign to publicize every facet of its mosquito control efforts.

From the News 10 article:

The decision follows Thursday’s announcement that two human cases of the virus have been detected in the county.

Now that’s an intense effort to publicize EVERY facet, huh?

Wanted to follow up on the WNV epidemic from a few weeks ago. It turns out that it is going to be very difficult to determine whether or not the abrupt spraying of pesticide over our homes even worked! According to a sacbee.com article, “it may be impossible ever to draw firm scientific conclusions on how much the pesticide treatments helped to stem the West Nile virus.” Apparently, this has a lot to do with budget restraints on the vector control agency.

I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but aren’t budgets the sort of thing you work out in advance? Like, maybe a year or so? Perhaps when we were told last year that this virus was out there and potentially could hit us hard if we didn’t wear long sleeved shirts, spray on the DEET, and stay inside during peak skeeter hours, the powers that be could have also been preparing themselves fiscally. Realizing that this could get to a point where mass spraying of potentially cancer causing chemicals would be required.

I don’t know, just seems a little Bush league (pun intended) to drop this stuff on us with no real, shall we say, exit strategy? (hey, we’re kicking it up a notch here at the rag so work with me!)

Another example of why you must do your own due diligence when forming opinions and doing research. Taken from News10 this morning:

Butte County Man Dies of West Nile Virus

“Wow!” you might say, “this is getting out of hand, people are dying left and right.” However, read on a few lines and you find:

The man who died was suffering from a chronic disease in addition to West Nile.

Now I am not saying this man did or didn’t die of the WNV, but “chronic disease” does sort of mean, well, “Lasting for a long period of time or marked by frequent recurrence, as certain diseases: chronic colitis.”

With all this talk of Sacramento’s mosquito killers, it’s interesting to note some similarities in how people were warned about mass spraying of pesticides to combat WNV in other jurisdictions.

In Canada, there’s a fight brewing in the province of Manitoba, where local citizens also were given very little warning about the spraying of Malathion (another mosquitocide) over residential neighborhoods (or as we say in Canada, nehbourhoods). While doctors up north have voiced their concerns, the push for large scale fogging is continuing.

It seems the modus operandi of “vector control” people is to give citizens little warning before spraying their property, pets and plants with bug poison.

Ah, the perils of democracy.

Kudos to Sac Rag reader Mariellen for finding a nice controversial spin to the spraying story. Together we can get to the bottom of this! We can make the powers that be bend an ear to the little guy because the little guy has the power of 10 bloggers and a handful of readers on his side! Either that, or together we’ll just wait patiently in front of the TV until the spraying is over and then forget about it when football season starts.

The Sac Rag is increasingly more alarmed with this WNV (yes, you know you are in deep doo doo when the acronym is thrown around) issue. For example, this excerpt from an article on News10.net:

This morning vector control district officials said they believe they have killed off 40 to 50 percent of the overall mosquito population in the sprayed area and called on residents to eliminate standing water where mosquitoes thrive. “After these applications, it’s not going to do us any good if people aren’t managing their water supplies — if they have unmaintained swimming pools, if they over-water their lawns — because we will see a recruitment of the adult mosquito population,” vector control district manager Dave Brown said.

Continue reading “Not to pile on, but, ok, to pile on” »

RonTopofIt turned me on to this map of the spraying area which uses the super cool Google Maps API. (I’m planning to implement that here at SacRag just as soon as I understand how to do that).

Anyway this whole thing is just getting out of control (hence the new category designation). Where was the public notification that there was even an epidemic? I’m sorry, but if there is a super deadly disease spreading through town I don’t want to have to tune in at just the right segment on News 10 to hear it from county health person Glenna Trochet. I want Arnold to freakin break into the news to tell me.

Also, “pyrethrin cancer” on Google yields 6300 results. (Pyrethrin being the mosquito killing pesticide being used.) But not to worry: “chocolate cancer” yields about 1.4 million!

Wait. It seems that SacRag would be in severe neglect if we all forgot to discuss the fact that our whole town is going to be cropdusted today and tomorrow by the Vector Control Department (I’m not sure what that is but it sounds like a department that only sees action when cropdusting neighborhoods is called for). Apparently this will save us all from West Nile Virus. I’m getting the sense it’s kind of a big deal considering a) they’re coating us in poison; b) Good Day Sacramento said we shouldn’t run our AC tonight and we’re supposed to wash down all outside furniture and keep our pets inside; c) it’s being done by this mysterious “Vector Control.” On one hand I’m not quite motivated enough to do even the minimal research that would be required for a remotely well-formed opinion. On the other hand, I’m thinking maybe the joy of blogging is that you can spout off opinions with or without any substantiation for them. Sooo… I guess I’m not liking the cropdusting. Counterpoint?