Mosquito Awareness Week April 15-22, 2018!

Mosquito Awareness Week April 15-22, 2018!

It takes a community to prevent mosquito problems!

We are receiving abundant precipitation this spring, which could lead to an abundance of mosquitoes, if we do not all take a hand and being mosquito breeding conscious. Residual standing water is of concern because the risk of establishing reproduction sites for mosquitoes near homes; disease-vectoring mosquitoes should not be given a home in your water barrel, your planters, or anywhere!

Because of the ongoing uncertainty of rainfall and water availability during our years of drought, many residents try to save any available water so their gardens and landscaping can survive. All these various water-holding containers provide ample sites for female mosquitoes to lay their eggs, which will pass through complete metamorphosis and may produce hordes of blood hungry mosquitoes that have the potential to transmit deadly diseases, such as West Nile Virus (WNV). Try to keep containers tightly covered, or finely screened so mosquitoes do not have access.

The practice of ‘dumping and draining’ of any container holding water on a weekly basis will greatly reduce mosquitoes around your home and neighborhood. In addition, reporting to Alameda County Vector Control (510-567-6700) any standing water sites that persist for more than a week, or the presence of mosquitoes, can help our staff stay on top of mosquito breeding and take measures to prevent the mosquitoes from emerging. There is also a statewide WNV dead bird-reporting website: http://westnile.ca.gov/report_wnv.php\ where you can report dead birds, which are one of the early warning surveillance tools. Infected birds transport WNV from place to place, and when they are viremic, a local mosquito feeds on them, the virus multiplies in the mosquito, and it can then pass this disease to the next victim. These birds sometime die from this infection, and testing the birds can give an early warning of WNV in an area.

Alameda County Vector Control has a comprehensive mosquito surveillance and control program that with the help of our community will be able to keep Albany safe from disease-vectoring mosquitoes. Twenty-seventeen was a very bad year for WNV in California, with 553 cases statewide and 44 fatalities. In Alameda County, there was one human WNV illness, two dead birds tested positive for WNV, but no mosquito samples were positive for the virus. Thankfully, none of the WNV activity was in Albany.