It has been a bad summer for mosquitoes in the Battlefords and area, and city council members for the City of North Battleford want to learn more about it.
To answer some of their questions, Monday they heard from Dr. Sean Prager of the University of Saskatchewan, who spoke to them on the issue of natural pest management strategies.
The pest that Prager focused his attention on was mosquitoes. Mayor Ryan Bater explained that there was a community discussion on how to deal with those pests, which appeared in droves about a week after heavy rains hit the community.
What makes mosquitoes unique is “they have certain lifestyles we don’t like,” said Prager — namely, biting people. One of the points Prager made early in the presentation is that for the most part “they are just annoying,” but in other parts of the world they can be a real public health issue in transmitting diseases.
He noted the Aedes varieties of mosquito can transmit diseases like Zika and Dengue, but we hardly ever see those types of mosquitoes here. The other is the Culex, which can transmit West Nile. He noted in Saskatchewan we hardly ever see these outbreaks.
Prager also noted mosquitoes hatch in standing pools of water, and that is why we get more mosquitoes after large rainfall events.
In places that have large disease concerns, they treat mosquitoes differently to prevent people from getting disease. But “our concern is how much nuisance we are willing to put up with.”
Bater explained at the meeting that the city’s strategy has been to put larvacide into standing water to control mosquitoes. But he wondered how far outside the city you needed to go to keep the mosquito population out. Prager believed it was only about a half mile and said “they’re not going to fly a long distance”.
He said the first line of defence is to communicate to people to get rid of standing water. Larvacide is an excellent choice, Prager said, mostly if you are going after the larger places you would find water. He also said the larvacide is also fairly harmless to non-mosquitoes.
In response to the latest outbreak, the Town of Battleford authorized fogging on the night of Aug. 4 to bring down the mosquito population.
Prager made it known he was no fan of fogging. He said it was mainly restricted to scenarios whether there was a high public health threat from mosquitoes.
“Fogging doesn’t work that well, it’s hard to do effectively, and as you may have guessed it doesn’t last that long,” said Prager. It may knock the populations down for a while, but he added if you have more rain and are not getting rid of the eggs, “they’ll just hatch and you’ll have more mosquitoes.”
The whole discussion was informational in nature, with council looking at strategies to better deal with the mosquito population in future years.
