No plans yet to fog for mosquitoes

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This article was published 17/06/2010 (5749 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While Winnipeg ponders whether to warm up the fogging trucks to deal with nuisance mosquitoes in that city, there is currently no plan to do the same here.

Despite recent warm weather which may boost the number of skeeters, the city’s director of community services, Rick Bailey, said the count hasn’t been high recently.

“To date, as of last week our counts are very, very low in our community,” Bailey said, adding recent cool weather likely helped.

In Winnipeg, officials were expected to announce a nuisance mosquito fogging plan if trap counts remained high today.

That means Winnipeg fogging trucks could soon be sent out to cope with a variety of mosquitoes that are nuisances but generally don’t transfer diseases to humans.

In Brandon, however, when it comes to spraying, city officials wait for Manitoba Health to declare that the level of Culex tarsalis mosquitoes — the variety known to carry the West Nile virus — has reached the point where it increases the risk of infection in humans.

No such orders have been issued.

The average Culex tarsalis trap count for the Brandon RHA between May 30 and June 5 was zero. In the Assiniboine RHA, it was less than one for that period.

Instead, the focus here is on larviciding, which has been used to target standing water across the city since May. That targets the insects while they’re larvae, whereas fogging is used to control adults.

Brandon workers also fog when necessary in other Westman communities such as Killarney, Deloraine and Virden. Again, workers wait for a bulletin from Manitoba Health before fogging.