Out of Control

Other bloodsucking insects merely annoy, but mosquitoes insult. By night, these slow, decadent flies whine around our heads, always vanishing when the light goes on. By day, they don't even pay us the respect of evasive action, content to be smeared across our exteriors in stains of protoplasm rather than curtail their orgies. Stay your hand, bear the sting, and watch as she deliberately probes with her six stilettos, injects anticoagulant, swills your blood until her abdomen resembles a ripe aneurysm, voids on your skin, and, finally, raises a hind leg in doglike salute.

Little wonder that any effort called "mosquito control"--regardless of results--tends to elicit enthusiasm. For a large element of the public there is something deeply satisfying in the sight and sound of a spray truck grinding along a suburban street, belching organophosphates or synthetic pyrethroids into the gathering twilight. In the 1980s, when I served on the Grafton, Massachusetts, Mosquito Advisory Board, a local mosquito-control official informed me that he and his waggish crew had filled their truck with pure H2O and sprayed a town with water vapor. Residents reported dramatic relief.

Such is the mindset that makes mosquito-control bureaucracies flourish and grow. Publicly funded mosquito-control programs, usually organized by county or region, exist in 41 states. In the United States mosquitoes can infect humans with such diseases as St. Louis virus and West Nile virus, but usually they don't. So it's the pathogen-free "nuisance" insect that is the bread and butter of mosquito controllers.

The mission of their professional group, the American Mosquito Control Association (AMCA), is the "enhancement of health and quality of life." But because mosquito controllers are trained, funded, and profoundly influenced by the pesticide industry and those tied to it, their definition of "quality of life" differs substantially from that of, say, a pediatrician. According to the AMCA's technical adviser, Joe Conlon, the greatest challenge U.S. mosquito controllers face is the decreasing availability of pesticides, especially organophosphates. The AMCA, he says, is fighting the attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "to take organophosphates away from us."

In recent issues of the AMCA's newsletter, columnist Peter H. Connelly, who works for Aventis (which produces permethrin, a synthetic pyrethroid), warns about the plot by "environmental extremists" to scare the public about pesticides and the plot by the Feds to ban pesticides. "The EPA," he writes, "believes that all pesticides are bad." Still, Connelly reports that business prospects for America's mosquito controllers are very bright: "We are possibly entering a period of industry growth unprecedented since the midwestern U.S. St. Louis virus outbreak of the 1970s."

Driving the current boom is West Nile virus, which showed up in New York City during the summer of 1999. Basically, it's a bird disease, and while its danger to humans should not be trivialized, neither should it be exaggerated. If you get the virus, it can be as dangerous as, say, the flu--which means it can kill you. In 1999 West Nile virus killed seven New Yorkers; in 2000 it killed two. The vast majority of people who get it recover with no damage.

West Nile virus had been studied for 61 years, but this was its debut in North America, and health officials panicked. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) urged preemptive air strikes with organophosphates and synthetic pyrethroids. County officials who procrastinated were informed by the CDC that if the mosquito-control unit didn't get cranked up PDQ and someone died of the disease, the CDC would let it be known that those officials had chosen to ignore its advice. If you found a dead bird that tested positive for West Nile, you needed to spray around it in a two-mile radius, the CDC announced.

The Audubon Society, which had worked with New York State to hatch a reasonable response plan, was horrified. "The only peer-reviewed professional science on this issue says there is no correlation between use of adulticides [pesticides for adult mosquitoes] and reducing disease," declares Bill Cooke, director of government relations for Audubon New York. "What we have are B.S. field studies put out by the pesticide companies. Decisions were being made on junk science. Spray a two-mile radius around a dead bird? Where's the data? Don't tell me to spray 12.5 square miles because you've got a dead bird that might have flown 50 miles that day!"

In New York City there weren't enough regular mosquito controllers to do the job, so new ones had to be trained, sometimes in less than a day. In 1999 Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ordered the city blitzed with malathion, a nerve toxin that kills or harms a broad spectrum of life, including insects, fish, mammals, and birds. Last year Giuliani's poison of choice was a cocktail of sumithrin and piperonyl butoxide, a chemical known to cause cancer in lab animals.

Children, people carrying groceries, and pregnant women--including the wife of Audubon's editor--were sprayed with no warning. Some required hospitalization. "You have to virtually, you know, drink this stuff [sumithrin] in order to have side effects," the mayor assured the public via the New York Daily News. People who objected were guilty of "zealous advocacy" and oblivious to "the importance of human life."