Last night, Baltimore joined cities like Dallas and New York by spraying insecticide in an attempt to fight back against the Zika virus.
So far, the handful of Zika cases reported in Baltimore have all been attributed to travelers who got the disease elsewhere. But, according to Baltimore City Health Commissioner Leana Wen, Zika is a “quickly developing situation,” and mosquito-borne Zika has spread to South Florida. Last night’s mosquito spraying was an attempt to keep it from becoming a bigger problem.
City employees are also canvassing neighborhoods, looking for the standing water that mosquitos love to use as breeding grounds.
Of course, airborne pesticides come with their own health risks; naled, the pesticide commonly used to spray for Zika, is banned in the EU because of the potential risks it poses to health and the environment–but according to the CDC, it’s both safe and effective. The city health department has been updating Twitter with its plans for future spraying; stay tuned, and make sure to close your windows and keep your pets inside!
This is crazy! It’s not even clear how much of an increase in cases of mircrocephaly occurred in Brazil, http://www.myinnerangrywonk.com/2016_08_01_archive.html
And infectious disease and mosquito experts agree that for many, many reasons, aerial spraying is not effective in controlling mosquitoes
http://www.myinnerangrywonk.com/2016_09_01_archive.html