Mosquito (from the Spanish meaning little fly[2]) is a common insect in the family Culicidae (from the Latin culex meaning midge or gnat[3]). Mosquitoes resemble crane flies (family Tipulidae) and chironomid flies (family Chironomidae), with which they are sometimes confused by the casual observer.
(Wikipedia)
W. Nile-infected mosquito discovered in Gilbert
by Srianthi Perera - May. 29, 2010 12:00 AM
Arizona
Maricopa County's first positive mosquito sample of West Nile virus this year has been discovered in Gilbert.
It's cause for concern to everybody in the county.
"We don't want to give the impression that if they are in another section of the Valley, they don't have to worry," said Johnny Diloné, spokesman for Maricopa County Environmental Services Department, which made the discovery.
"We want to create awareness and get everybody to take the necessary precautions," he said.
They give you free mosquito fish there. I wants me some free mosquito fish.
Mosquitoes all the buzz this Memorial Day weekend
Minnesota (today)
Mike McLean with the Metropolitan Mosquito Control District (MMCD) said, "This is, by about two weeks, this is the earliest we have started our larval control program. In general we start is around late April, early May. This year we started it right in the middle of April."
So McLean said his agency is doing its part to keep the whiny pests at bay. He said, "We've treated actually over 100,000 acres so far in the seven county metro area with the larval control."
Still, despite what McLean called an average 75 percent reduction of mosquitoes in the metro annually, he says eliminating them completely is not the goal of the MMCD.
Mosquitoes already? That’s the buzz
Boston Globe, May 28
At the offices of the Norfolk County Mosquito Control Project, the phone has jangled with increasing urgency as residents call with a lament and a plea: There are lots of bugs, the callers report. Come and do something.
Workers have taken to yards with traps and harvested bumper crops of mosquitoes. This week, spraying to kill adult mosquitoes began in the most bug-besotted swatches of Norfolk County.
"It is very unusual," Chan Suom, the entomologist at the Norfolk mosquito office, said yesterday. "We don’t see this kind of mosquito abundance this early."
also
"The only thing that’s harder to predict than mosquitoes," DeMaria said, "is influenza."
Public support needed to combat city’s growing mosquito menace
By Stabroek staff | May 29, 2010 in Local News
Guyana, May 29
The Mayor and City Council started an anti-mosquito campaign in March, and its Vector Control Unit started with the spraying of street and alleyway drains in the North and South Ruimveldt areas. The activity was said to have been done in other areas of the city and is ongoing.
However Mayor of the city, Hamilton Green called the task of tackling the mosquito population a "herculean," adding that fogging is only a temporary solution. Green said that while fogging helps to control the increase of the insects, it is not the solution. "We are doing our best in the circumstance," he said. Green added that there needs to be (sic) corporation rom residents.
The mayor also requests that the citizens keep their drains clean. I bet we have drain problems in the USA too. And styrofoam boxes lying around, and old tires. We just have a press that has more critical things on its mind to discuss than disease vectors.
Lack of mosquito spraying in Stratham causes ire
New Hampshire, May 28
STRATHAM — The Board of Selectmen and Town Administrator Paul Deschaine had been bugged since last week by the lack of response from N.H. Fish and Game regarding mosquito spraying. However, late Thursday afternoon, the town won its fight to spray for mosquito pools on Fish and Game land in town.
Interesting story. Big intergovernmental fight here.
"It sent me into orbit," Deschaine said about the denial of treatment to the land. He sent a scathing e-mail to Fish and Game and reached out to state Reps. Donna Schlachman and Matt Quandt, and Sen. Maggie Hassan, all of Exeter, for help.
A new policy for conducting larviciding and adulticiding was instituted three years ago after it was banned on Fish and Game property two years prior. Before that, Stratham sprayed for mosquitoes in salt marsh land owned by Fish and Game for 18 years.
Volunteer counts biting bugs
Virginia, May 29
YORK — Most summer nights, Dawn Young sits hunched over a white piece of paper in her husband's garage — counting mosquitoes.
Sorting through an assortment of bugs quickly became a nightly ritual for Young ,44, when she signed up to be a volunteer mosquito controller for York County.
An old composition notebook holds the information about the mosquitoes Young and her family have trapped over the years. The data is an invaluable source of knowledge for the county.
"By volunteering I become a part of the solution," she said.
I liked that story a lot. Those people are very cool.
A Mosquito Zapping Laser That Fights Malaria? Yes!
Intellectual Ventures Lab is shooting mosquitos out of the sky with lasers. The invention-focused company received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to find solutions for many of the world’s leading health problems, including malaria. Using cheap components from various commercial technologies (laser printers, digital cameras, etc) IVL has devised a fence-like system which would monitor for mosquitos and zap them as they try to fly by. By controlling the mosquito population the company hopes to stop the spread of malaria which kills more than a million people each year.
Huh.
Tropical Diseases: Outbreak of Dengue Fever Is Reported in Florida, Health Officials Say
May 24, NYT
Dengue fever, a growing scourge in the tropics, has established itself in a popular American tourist destination, federal health officials reported last week.
Last August, an alert doctor in upstate New York realized that one of his patients, whose only recent travel had been to Key West, Fla., had dengue — a mosquito-borne virus that causes joint pain so severe it is nicknamed "break-bone fever" in Latin America and Asia. According to last week’s report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Florida health authorities have since found 27 more cases, all in Key West, the last in April. Most victims had a fever and pain in the head, body and eyes, and some had a rash.
The C.D.C. advised doctors to consider a dengue diagnosis in patients with similar symptoms who have been to subtropical parts of the United States. Although there have been outbreaks along the Texas-Mexico border since 1980, the disease had not been seen in Florida since 1934.
Global warming unlikely to expand range of malaria
May 21, London
Opposing a widespread assumption, two University of Florida researchers have found that global warming is unlikely to expand the range of malaria because of malaria control, development and other factors that are at work to corral the disease.
Scientists and public policy makers have been concerned that warming temperatures would create conditions that would either push malaria into new areas or make it worse in existing ones. But the team of six scientists, including David Smith and Andy Tatem, analysed a historical contraction of the geographic range and general reduction in the intensity of malaria -- a contraction that occurred over a century during which the globe warmed.
They determined that if the future trends are like past ones, the contraction is likely to continue under the most likely warming scenarios. "If we continue to fund malaria control, we can certainly be prepared to counteract the risk that warming could expand the global distribution of malaria," Nature quoted Smith as saying.