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Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002
Posted by: Robert Foster (rfoster62@yahoo.com)

Every time a local, state or federal health unit undertakes a mosquito control activity there is an opportunity to conduct studies to determine efficacy and non-target impacts.

Citizens Campaign for the Environment believes that it is responsible when public funds are used to justify efficacy and assumptions regarding non-target and human health impacts with concrete data.

Sufficient federal, state and local resources should be provided to accommplish this goal.

In New York State, legislation has been introduced to provide state funding to conduct the type of monitoring necessary to determine efficacy and non-target impacts.

Robert Foster
Program Director
Citizens Campaign for the Environment

norman robbins wrote:

Dear West Nile List-Servers,

As a scientist, I am greatly disturbed to read lengthy discussions and CDC or State recommendations for WNv actions that often appear to be based mainly on opinion rather than citations of statistical validation. As much as one prefers prospective studies, could a thorough and sophisticated CDC retrospective analysis of activities (e.g. larviciding, adulticiding in 1999-2002) and resulting mosquito density and human disease, shed some light on questions we will once again be debating in the next few months?

I encourage List-servers to revise or expand the following list of questions in the hope that a collated version can be signed by you and sent to CDC advocating that they use resources to investigate these issues. My sense is that the CDC people are not at all resistant to undertaking this analysis -- they just need outside advocacy to gain the resources.

QUESTIONS FOR CDC TO INVESTIGATE BY ANALYSIS OF WEST NILE DATA TO DATE:

What is the STATISTICAL EVIDENCE AND PROBABILITY RANGE (not opinion) that:

1. larviciding (at WHAT intensity and frequency) reduces mosquito populations (by species)?

2. URBAN adulticiding (at what intensity, frequency, area and method) reduces mosquito populations, by species and for how long?

3. there are (or are not) acute or chronic human health effects of urban adulticiding in typical ULV amounts and frequency?

4. certain types of public messages or policies are more or less effective than others in reducing urban standing water (residential, public spaces, etc.)

5. one or another type of surveillance (dead crows, gravid or C0-2/light traps, virus-positive mosquitoes, etc.) predicts human disease with what kind of probability range.

6. both gravid and C0₂/light traps are desirable for human disease prediction.

7. there is some level of mosquito density which predicts risk of animal or human disease and calls for more aggressive mosquito management

Norman Robbins
Shaker Heights (OH) West Nile Task Force

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