Latest round of fogging comes at a cost for city

In a fit of mosquito-bitten frustration that was felt around the council table over the past few weeks, the City of Brandon decided that our summer was too short to waste on battling the backyard blood-suckers.

So last week, councillors voted unanimously to fog city streets to be rid of the majority of the mosquito plague that was largely generated by all the standing floodwater along the Assiniboine River and the heavy rains that the region experienced in June.

This in spite of the fact that the city’s mosquito trap counts were lower than the stated threshold that would normally trigger a fogging response. Fogging in Brandon is only carried out if a daily trap count average exceeds 1,000 mosquitoes, but official trap counts were far too low otherwise.

“People can’t take their kids to the park without getting eaten alive, or the splash parks,” said Coun. Shawn Berry (Ward 7), who put forward the motion during the July 27 council meeting. “They can’t go outside and work in the yard without getting eaten alive.”

The pressure to “do something” about the mosquito problem must have been strong for this council. Berry told the Sun that “more and more people” were complaining and sending emails and calls to councillors before the Monday meeting.

The situation was certainly made worse by the lack of available retail mosquito repellent available in local stores due to the surge in mosquito numbers.

So of course we just had to scratch that itch, albeit one we have not scratched since 2022 when we last fogged for mosquitoes.

And while it certainly felt good — mosquito numbers definitely seem down — it does come at a bit of a cost, in that it has further depleted the city’s stores of DeltaGard, a fast-acting insecticide that is no longer on the market.

Manufacturing company Envu Canada stopped production of DeltaGard after 2023. As a result, the city’s best weapon against mosquitoes is nearly gone. The Sun has been told the city is down to one last application of the product following last week’s fogging.

The City of Winnipeg, like Brandon, is nearly out of DeltaGard as well. And unless a suitable mosquito adulticide becomes available, it will require both cities to change how they approach mosquito control.

It will also affect the province of Manitoba, which keeps stores of DeltaGard on hand that are only used when a ministerial order is given under the Environment Act to spray as a means to prevent human exposure to the West Nile virus.

Such an order was also given last week for Winnipeg, Altona, the RM of Macdonald, RM of West St. Paul and the RM of Rhineland, where large numbers of the virus-carrying Culex tarsalis mosquito were found between July 21 and July 27.

That should be a little food for thought to those city residents who were pushing for Brandon to fog this summer. If we find ourselves in a bind next year or the year after, and we don’t have a replacement, we may not be able to rely on Winnipeg or even the province to offer mosquito relief.

In Winnipeg’s case, it’s unlikely they will want to share what little they have left. And as for the province, the government would most likely save it for health emergencies, which — even as uncomfortable as it was — Brandon’s recent fogging experience was decidedly not.

Winnipeg has been thinking about what to do if and when the community’s store of DeltaGard runs out. Last fall, a city report provided a few options, which included increasing the amount allowed in Winnipeg’s insect control reserve to $5 million from $2 million to allow service to be ramped up when needed. The report also suggested reducing the number of sites that would require mosquito treatment, and spending several hundred thousand dollars to boost larviciding efforts in that city.

Currently, Brandon’s larviciding program starts in May, with five city staff targeting standing water in the community. No doubt these employees were overwhelmed this year because of the city’s flooding issues.

“In drier years, they can do their whole row in a day. It’s taken about two and a half days to do their route just with the standing water,” the city’s acting parks and recreation director, Bryce Wilson, told the CBC.

City resident James Epp had a point when he suggested in a recent letter to the editor that the City of Brandon will have to significantly increase its larviciding program, which of course will cost more money, if it hopes to prevent future problem years that yield high mosquito counts. Of course, that will require more budget dollars.

Brandon Mayor Jeff Fawcett remains hopeful that a new alternative to DeltaGard can be found before Brandon’s last round of the insecticide runs out. And Berry wants to see the city and province get more proactive in finding alternative ways to fog for the little beasties. We’d like to see that too, and we hope that an option will soon present itself.

To our knowledge, that has not happened yet.

In the meantime, until a replacement is found, a future council may want to hold off bowing to public pressure to “save summer” for Brandon backyards, and let the science decide.

You never know when we may really need it.