ATHENS COUNTY, Ohio — For nearly 10 years, the Athens City-County Health Department has been running a mosquito surveillance program to map out areas of high mosquito activity and fight the spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes.
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency recently announced that the Athens City-County Health Department would receive just over $12,000 in grant funding for its mosquito population surveillance and control program.
The health department has consistently received mosquito control funding since the state began offering the grants in 2016, said Patrick McGarry, director of environmental health at the health department.
The lion’s share of the $12,172 grant will support pay and mileage for interns who run the program throughout the summer, McGarry said. The remainder will be used to buy mosquito repellant and protective equipment, replace broken mosquito traps and print pamphlets for public education.
As part of the program, interns operate the health department’s mosquito and vector borne diseases hotline, a number which county residents can call to alert the health department to mosquito activity.
The interns then drive around the county to set up mosquito traps that help the department identify areas to target to eliminate mosquitoes that carry illnesses like the West Nile and Zika viruses.
“We spend a couple days of the week setting mosquito traps in known locations that we’ve had nuisance complaints and known areas that have a lot of mosquito activity,” McGarry said. “Over the years we see trends, so we concentrate traps in certain areas.”
Most of the traps are designed to attract female mosquitoes that lay eggs in stagnant water, he said.
Diseases like West Nile have spread at a rapid pace in the last 25 years, with the first US case being reported in New York City in 1999. The virus is now a routine sight in several states, with the Ohio Department of Health stating that “cases [of West Nile Virus] occur each year and seasonal epidemics can flare up under certain conditions in the summer and continue into the fall.”
Previous rounds of grant funding have been used to buy lab equipment for mosquito testing, allowing the department to test in-house rather than sending specimens to Columbus.
“In the past, we’d submitted mosquitoes up to the state lab toward the end of the week and we’d get results mid-week the following week,” McGarry said. “If we saw positive mosquito pools of West Nile, it’d be a bit of a delayed response. We felt that it was necessary and cost effective that we buy a PCR test kit here so that we can do real time testing.”
McGarry said that he expects Athens County’s mosquito problems to worsen as a result of climate change.
“We recognize it’s not going to get any better as the climate is changing,” McGarry said. “When I started there were only about three [mosquitoes of concern] — now we have 10-plus mosquitoes of concern that we just did not see before.”
The EPA, environmental activists and university researchers all expect mosquito- and tick-borne diseases to spread as climate change makes habitats more suitable for these insects.
According to the World Mosquito Program, extreme weather events such as flooding are creating conditions where it is hard to monitor mosquito populations while creating an ideal environment for breeding.
