West Nile Hype
So, the Long Weekend is over, and many are coming back from their holidays at the lake or wherever. They did a variety of things, but they noticed that all those mosquitoes are going to bite them and give them West Nile! Oh no, we have to fog to keep those mosquitoes away!
Here's a reality check, people. West Nile is not a big scourge. Manitoba has not recorded a death from West Nile in 2 years, and the number of cases run in the thousands. This is in a province with a million people, so your odds there are good. Very few people are left with permanent effects from West Nile. Take any medium-sized Manitoba community, and I bet there are as many, if not more, people in each community afflicted with asthma as there are annual cases of West Nile. Aside from fatalities, asthma cases are quite chronic, and they cause many problems when people have to be rushed by ambulance to a hospital when they have an attack. Yet, take a look at any Manitoba media outlet, and you'll find far more about West Nile than asthma.
The chemicals people want to fog with are also contentious. Since they're designed to kill, the general effects are not good. When the City of Winnipeg fogs, residents can normally ask for a buffer zone the City won't spray if they don't want their property to be fogged, but if Manitoba Health declares a West Nile emergency, the City is ordered to spray and to ignore those buffer zones. Several environmental and medical groups have expressed concerns about the impact of fogging, both on the environment in such manifestations as concentrations of toxins in organisms, and on health in such manifestations as cancers. Are we wrong about some of the impacts? Possibly. Do we know all of the impacts of fogging? No. The chemical processes involved with chemical fogging and the fogging products breaking down and moving through the environment are complex. Now, since we don't know much about the impacts of fogging, and West Nile isn't as bad compared to other problems even though West Nile receives more than its fair share of coverage, is it worth it to force chemicals on people who want to be left alone in order to placate people who can't stand any sort of discomfort?
I don't think so.
posted by aristotleded24 @ 11:21 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Hey Dustin,
Just to give a bit of cynical Marxist slant to this discussion I have decided to comment.
You know, as do many of the people reading this that the decision makers are jsut upset that they can not go into their $100K yards with out getting bitten by our mini menace. This distresses them all greatly and many have taken to fogging thier yards with little to no concern for their neighbors.
In fact the BS (Brandon Sun or Bull Shit depending on you view point) had a full front page article about this issue, and they interviewed a rich west ender about the mosquito problem and he did not cite West Nile as the issue, but rather his personal comfort levels.
The issue of West Nile is much like religion or MTV, it is simply a distraction designed to cultivate opinion to a favorable outcome.
I agree that it is rediculous to even be concerned about West Nile, many people who get it recover like it was a bad flu!
But that doesn't change the fact that we have to SPRAY BABY SPRAY! What about bats? What about dragon flys? If we put bat houses strategically through out the city maintained by the city the cost would be comperable to sraying and it would be much more effective since the spray only kills off the adult mosquitos (and adult dragonflys). This does not harm the mosquito eggs, allowing the mosquito population to pop back up, but the dragonflys (which are not as prolific as mosquitos) are now sufering a huge dent in their population.
So, spraying kills our first line of defence with out really hurting the mosquitos. Brandon has not fogged this year and look at how the mosquito population boomed at first and then kind of died off... hard core! Has anyone else seen the army of dragonflys? I feel like I am in a war-zone, but I am happy because I'm on the winning team... Nature's team!
I am buying a bat house soon to encourage bats to live and eat near my house. One bat can eat 6,000 mosquitos an hour on average, and they are cute as a button! Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinion!
Anyway, that was all I had to say on the matter, and by the way Dustin, great site!
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