Thursday, October 03, 2024

Elect Ed Slavin to Anastasia Mosquito Control Board of St. Johns County, Seat 1

To St. Johns County voters: May I please have the honor of your vote -- either early, or on November 5, 2024 -- for a seat as Commissioner of the Anastasia Mosquito District of St. Johns County, Seat 1?

Here's my Q&A with the League of Women Voters:

What motivated you to run for office?

It's our money. I've been a watchdog on mosquito control since 2006. Mosquitoes could bring us the next global pandemic. We will be prepared with data, research, education, and environmentally-friendly, non-toxic natural pesticides. My dad was an 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper, infected with malaria in Sicily. Dad recovered in Army hospitals, but we saw dad suffer lifetime effects. LWV's Ms. Robin Nadeau asked me to help her investigate Anastasia Mosquito Control of St. Johns County, buying a $1.8 million no-bid, luxury Bell Jet Long Ranger helicopter incapable of killing a single skeeter, not unlike buying a Porsche to use with a snowplow. We persuaded AMCD to cancel illegal, no-bid helicopter contract, saving $1.8 million in 2007.  

What do you see as the most pressing issues for this office and how do you propose to address them?
Advancing research and education while protecting scientific integrity and employee whistleblower rights; safeguarding the independence of AMCD, an independent scientific and technical organization; protecting public health, the environment and public funds. Let's assure that "whistleblower" ethical employees are heard and heeded whenever they raise concerns. Let's resist any further effort by the St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners to take over independent AMCD, as attempted by former SJC County Administrator Michael Wanchick and County Commission Chairmen. I oppose allowing arbitration clauses in AMCD contracts, Yes, I've been a watchdog of mosquito control environmental protection and spending since December 2006.

What training, experience, and characteristics qualify you for this position?

Helped persuade our independent mosquito district to cancel unwise, no-bid luxury $1.8 million helicopter contract. Won declassification of our frail planet's largest-ever mercury pollution event (Oak Ridge, Tenn. Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Plant),triggering nationwide cleanups; recommended for Pulitzer Prize by DA. Clerked for USDOL Chief Administrative Law Judge Nahum Litt and Judge Charles Rippey. Staffer for Senators Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart & Jim Sasser. B.S.F.S., Georgetown U.; J.D., Memphis State U. Your watchdog, termed an "environmental hero" by FOLIO WEEKLY (after reporting City's illegal dumping of landfill in lake and illegal sewage effluent pollution of our saltwater marsh). Shall we ask questions, demand answers & expect democracy?

How important are environmental concerns when making decisions for the Anastasia Mosquito Control District?
Very important

Explain your answer.

Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" informs good science and use of non-toxic natural pesticides as much as possible. Amid global climate change, the next pandemic could be a mosquito-borne disease. Let's protect AMCD independence, education and applied research to protect public health and our environment. I support AMCD's leadership on natural pesticides. I once reported FEMA and AMCD to federal environmental law officials when bald eagles were exposed to organophosphate pesticides. Support AMCD working with other mosquito control districts and officials to share scientific knowledge to protect all of us "non-target species": mosquito control workers, residents, tourists, pets, horses, livestock, bees and other pollinators, flora and fauna. 

St. Johns County is growing rapidly. How does this impact the management of mosquito control?

Overdevelopment increases the expense of mosquito control and increases exposure of families to mosquitoes from wetlands. St. Johns County Commissioners, developers and their big money clout decide way too many unwise development decisions. This requires our nimble small mosquito control special taxing district to innovate, with sensitive adaptation of mosquito control techniques to protect entire new neighborhoods, which seem to spring up overnight, adjoining wetlands. Public education, applied research, sound science-based policies and non-toxic mosquito control methods, are all essential to protecting public health from mosquito-borne diseases. AMCD exists to prevent any outbreaks of deadly mosquito-borne diseases. We must do it right!



Mosquitoes Are a Growing Public Health Threat, Reversing Years of Progress (Stephanie Nolan, NY Times, September 29, 2023)

I have been a watchdog on mosquito control since 2006-7. Folks, I ould be honored by your votes for Commissioner of our Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County, seat 1.  Vote by mail, vote early, or vote on November 5, 2024. Mosquitoes are the most dangerous animals on Earth, killing some 600,000 people annually.  My dad was bitten by a malarial mosquito during the invasion of Sicily in WWII; he had lifetime health effects.  We know that safe, cost-effective mosquito control is essential to Florida's outdoor and tourist economy.  From The New York Times:

Mosquitoes Are a Growing Public Health Threat, Reversing Years of Progress 

Climate change and the rapid evolution of the insect have helped drive up malaria deaths and brought dengue and other mosquito-borne viruses to places that never had to worry about them.

Stephanie Nolen reported this story from five countries in Africa and Latin America, part of a special project looking at the fight against mosquito-borne disease.

Along hundreds of miles of Lake Victoria’s shoreline in Kenya, a squadron of young scientists and an army of volunteers are waging an all-out war on a creature that threatens the health of more people than any other on earth: the mosquito.

They are testing new insecticides and ingenious new ways to deliver them. They are peering in windows at night, watching for the mosquitoes that home in on sleeping people. They are collecting blood — from babies, from moto-taxi drivers, from goat herders and from their goats — to track the parasites the mosquitoes carry.

But Eric Ochomo, the entomologist leading this effort on the front lines of global public health, stood recently in the swampy grass, laptop in hand, and acknowledged a grim reality: “It seems as though the mosquitoes are winning.”

Less than a decade ago, it was the humans who appeared to have gained the clear edge in the fight — more than a century old — against the mosquito. But over the past few years, that progress has not only stalled, it has reversed.

The insecticides used since the 1970s, to spray in houses and on bed nets to protect sleeping children, have become far less effective; mosquitoes have evolved to survive them. After declining to a historic low in 2015, malaria cases and deaths are rising.

MClimate change has brought mosquitoes carrying viruses that cause dengue and chikungunya, excruciating and sometimes deadly fevers, to places where they have never been found before. Once a purely tropical disease, dengue is now being transmitted in Florida and France. This past summer, the United States saw its first locally transmitted cases of malaria in 20 years, with nine cases reported, in Texas, Florida and Maryland.

“The situation has become challenging in new ways in places that have historically had these mosquitoes, and also at the same time other places are going to face new threats because of climate and environmental factors,” Dr. Ochomo said.

ImageA line of researchers wearing white lab coats use red-tubed aspirators to move mosquitoes to and from small, clear, conical dishes and small covered cups on a lab table.
At the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kisumu, workers separate male from female mosquitoes trapped overnight at study sites in the surrounding region. 
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A detailed view of a mosquito under the mesh top of a paper cup in the lab.
A trapped mosquito at the research institute. Only female mosquitoes bite humans, and thus transmit malaria.
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A researcher pulls a collection of mosquitoes from a freezer in a lab, where two other researchers sit at a table doing their work.
Technician Celestine Akinyi Ogutu takes mosquitoes from a freezer. The trapped insects are frozen to kill them, then dissected to study whether they have bitten a human and carry the malaria parasite.

Scientists around the world are pressing hard for new solutions, including novel technologies that Dr. Ochomo is testing. They have developed some promising approaches, including a new generation of tools that modifies mosquitoes biologically, and genetically, to block disease.

But such efforts have been stymied by cost and regulatory hurdles. The process for getting any of these tools to the places where children fall ill with each new season of rain involves years of testing and regulatory reviews that are painfully slow and badly underfunded.

“It’s just ridiculous how much time we are wasting before we can get into the field and actually start saving lives,” said Bart Knols, a Dutch vector biologist who runs mosquito-borne disease elimination projects across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

Malaria has killed more people than any other disease over the course of human history. Until this century, the battle against the parasite was badly one-sided. Then, between 2000 and 2015, malaria cases dropped by a third worldwide, and mortality decreased by nearly half, because of widespread use of insecticide inside homes, insecticide-coated bed nets and better treatments. Clinical trials showed promise for malaria vaccines that might protect the children who make up the bulk of malaria deaths.

That success lured new investment and talk of wiping the disease out all together.

But malaria deaths, which fell to a historic low of about 575,000 in 2019, rose significantly over the next two years and stood at 620,000 in 2021, the last year for which there is global data.

There were more cases of dengue in Latin America in the first half of this year — more than three million — than in all of 2022. Bangladesh is in the grip of its largest-ever dengue outbreak, with 120,000 cases by the end of August. Cases of and deaths from chikungunya and other mosquito-borne infections have started rising, too, in many regions of the world.

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A view of a model thatched-roof mud home under a very large mesh canopy with mesh walls for conducting mosquito research.
Entomologists at the Kenya Medical Research Institute testing anti-mosquito technologies in a model village inside a giant mesh cage.
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Augustine Ochieng sits on a wooden bench in a dark room of his home and is brightly illuminated by a tablet device he logs information into. The walls of a his home are lined with fabric and several posters, and a small lamp sits at his feet.
Augustine Ochieng, a volunteer in Alego, western Kenya, tracked data on a tablet provided to him by the research institute. He was asked to sit with his bare legs exposed all night, harvest any mosquitoes that try to bite him and log the results.

One of the main reasons is that mosquitoes are highly adaptable. As more and more people are protected by nets or sprays at home, mosquitoes have begun to bite more outdoors and in the daytime, instead of indoors and at night, the historic pattern of the malaria vector species in Africa. Because the genetic makeup of mosquitoes evolves quickly in response to changing environmental conditions, they have also developed resistance to the class of insecticides in wide use — while the malaria parasite itself is increasingly resistant to the once highly-effective drugs used to treat it.

And a new mosquito that thrives in urban areas has come from Asia to Africa, where the spread of malaria had always been confined largely to the countryside. That change has made more than 100 million additional people vulnerable to mosquito-borne infections, researchers at the University of Oxford recently estimated.

The multiplying risks, experts say, mean there’s an urgent need for a method to protect people from all mosquitoes — one that will help defend against malaria, but also dengue, yellow fever and whatever pathogen lurks around the corner. (Only female mosquitoes bite; they need the protein in blood to produce eggs.)

But it takes a decade or more to design, develop, test and produce a new technology or intervention. Contrast that with the six-week life spans of mosquitoes, which are constantly evolving to elude the ways we try to kill them.

The bulk of the money for these efforts to date has come from high-income nations and private philanthropists, but funding levels have plateaued. Multiple researchers said it was increasingly difficult to motivate the kind of investment they need for large-scale trials of new methods.

“Sooner or later, funding bodies are going to divert that money to other things,” Dr. Knols said. “They’re going to say, ‘We’re putting it into agriculture, or into schooling.’”

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A wide view of a clear area of Amukura in Busia County, with a single tree in the middle of the clearning, with a forest and hills on the horizon. Large, dark clouds move in from the left.
Amukura in Busia County, Kenya, where the entomologist Eric Ochomo oversees two large clinical trials of new tools to fight mosquitoes.

In the towns and villages of Busia County in Kenya, the roads begin to fill while the sky is still the streaky purple of dawn, with farmers on the way to their fields, children in freshly pressed uniforms walking to school and moto-taxi drivers reporting to the market.

Dr. Ochomo’s research has found that the mosquito Anopheles funestus is feasting on them: The species, once thought to bite mostly sleepers in their beds at night, now bites outside in the daytime.

Four in 10 people on these red-dirt roads are carrying the malaria parasite, even if they don’t have symptoms, studies by Dr. Ochomo and his colleagues have found. Some outdoor and daytime biting was likely happening all along, but no one was really tracking it because the focus was on the vulnerable sleepers.

Twenty years ago, in the early days of the mass distribution of bed nets, malaria case rates plunged immediately, and there was an optimism that the nets might be enough, said Audrey Lenhart, the chief of entomology at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Instead, she said, they have helped to create a new problem.

“Think about it: You put bed nets everywhere, then the mosquitoes that bite people inside, they’re going to die out,” Dr. Lenhart explained. “The ones that are going to survive are the ones that are biting people sitting outside, biting livestock, the ones that aren’t in the houses, right? So then those are the ones that are reproducing and keeping the population of mosquitoes there.”

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A close-up view of a table covered with medical devices as a health worker processes blood samples and logs them.
Processing blood samples collected from children at the Amukura Health Centre as part of a clinical trial of a new mosquito-control method. 
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A close-up view of blood samples, which are red dots on microscope slides, each with a handwritten label carrying information about its collection.
Microscope slides with blood collected from children enrolled in the clinical trial.

Most of the current insecticides in use are pyrethroids, which were developed in the 1970s and derived from the chemical compounds in an ancient mosquito deterrent made by crushing aster flowers. They have been used for everything, including bed nets and for spraying on walls.

With mosquitoes around the world now highly resistant to them, there is an urgent search for something new.

In 2005, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $50 million in a project called the Innovative Vector Control Consortium to search for effective insecticide compounds. The consortium asked large agrochemical companies to look in their chemical libraries for molecules that might affect mosquitoes in novel ways and be safe and durable enough.

“We started with four-and-a-half-million compounds, and we’re down to four,” said Nick Hamon, who recently retired as the consortium’s chief executive.

To work as a new insecticide, compounds have to be safe for humans, come in solid form and not be water soluble. And they have to kill mosquitoes in a substantively different way than pyrethroids do, because mosquitoes develop resistance not just to an individual chemical, but to the way the chemical kills them.

Companies must now complete the safety and testing process on the only four compounds that tick all those boxes. It is intensely costly and slow, said Susanne Stutz, the chief chemist at the German chemical company BASF.

“It’s always a race with the mosquito, who is faster: Usually, the mosquito wins because it develops the resistance much faster than new products come out,” she said.

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Eric Ochomo wears jeans and a gray-green t-shirt and sunglasses as he walks along a marshy area with standing water at his right.
Dr. Ochomo inspecting a pond near a home in Asembo, a village on the coast of Lake Victoria, for larvae from malarial mosquitoes.
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A person leans against a wooden fishing boat and tends to several small cows under the shade of a tree at the edge of Lake Victoria.
The edge of Lake Victoria in Siaya County, western Kenya, the area of the mosquito trials.
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A health worker raises his arms to install small plastic patial repellent panels above a window covered in a curtain on the wall of a home. It has a tin roof and a lace fabric pinned to the walls.
Hanging up spatial repellent panels in a home. The panels are intended to protect people from mosquito bites when they are awake rather than when they’re sleeping in bed.

The World Health Organization requires two large randomized clinical trials, carried out in two different geographic and epidemiological settings, showing a significant positive impact on public health in both, before it will recommend use of a new intervention against mosquitoes. The organization says the policy is designed to make sure that countries with limited means are making the best decisions about where to spend their money and to ensure that products are backed by rigorous evidence. Yet the world’s multiplying mosquito problems increasingly require solutions tailored to specific situations: What works to protect children in the African Sahel won’t be what works to protect loggers in forests in Cambodia.

Dr. Ochomo is the principal investigator on two large randomized clinical trials of mosquito interventions. In one $33 million project, researchers are testing the effectiveness of spatial repellents — squares of plastic film that can be hung on the walls inside homes and that dispense low doses of a chemical that confuses mosquitoes and prevents them from biting — in both dengue and malaria risk areas.

S.C. Johnson & Son Inc., the Wisconsin-based company that developed the spatial repellent being tried in Kenya, has donated millions of dollars in products for testing. Such largess is unusual — and not a sustainable pathway for vector control research, said John Grieco, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame who coordinates the multicountry spatial repellent trial, which is also running in countries including Mali and Sri Lanka.

The spatial repellents and most other new tools are commodities: items that have to be bought, then bought again six months or a year later. The protection they offer is temporary, as is the funding that allows for their purchase.

The Gates Foundation, the major backer of most of the clinical trials of the commodities, has also had to cover most of the cost of BASF’s testing of new chemicals for use on bed nets, because there is not sufficient profit incentive for a private firm to do it, Dr. Stutz said.

“How do you keep the companies that know how to innovate in this space?” Dr. Hamon asked. The Innovative Vector Control Consortium lost one of its key industry partners in 2017.

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Beryle Etyang, covered in a protective suit, carries a large blue cooler containing spatial repellent panels as she exits the large tin-walled refrigerator container they’re stored in.
Beryle Etyang prepared to deliver a cooler of spatial repellent panels via motorbike from a refrigerated storage facility at a Kenya Medical Research Institute site in Alupe.

“They just said, ‘We can make more money somewhere else,’” Dr. Hamon said.

Some experts believe the emergence of dengue fever, and now malaria, in middle- and high-income countries could generate new funding because it creates a wealthier market that may spur new corporate investment.

Skeptics in the entomology world look at the race for new commodities, and suggest it ignores a lesson from history: They say that only the same strategies that high-income nations used more than a century ago will once again give humans the edge over mosquitoes. In Europe and the America in the early 1900s, and in Brazil in the 1930s, it was large-scale environmental management and changes in housing that made a difference, said Silas Majambere, a Burundian vector ecologist who has worked all over Africa, Europe and Asia.

That means draining breeding sites, spraying larvicides (which are biological toxins and don’t cause resistance) on water that can’t be drained and moving homes out of swampy areas. To protect against urban mosquitoes, people need screened windows and solid walls and roofs with closed eaves: better houses.

“If we had spent the last 40 years doing these things, with the same budget, where would we be today?” Dr. Majambere said.

Image
Mary Oketeti wears a white shirt with thin straps and a small repeating plant patter. She stands outside against a wall and wears a purple, orange and red patterned headscarf.
Mary Oketeti, 55, said her 12-year-old daughter Cynthia had to be hospitalized three times last year with malaria.
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A portrait of Sirista Etyeng, who wears an orangish headscarf and a light purple dress that's elaborately patterned. She clasps her hands in front of her knees as she sits on a yellow-orange couch against a yellow-orange wall.
Sirista Etyeng, 78, said she falls ill with malaria five or six times a year. She was given a spatial repellent in her home as part of a randomized controlled trial.

While malaria cases are far lower than they were 20 years ago in the Busia area, the stalled progress means the disease continues to erode family health, income and futures.

“When there is a malaria case in the house, it suspends life,” said Mary Oketeti, a farmer who lives about an hour’s drive outside the town of Busia. She gets malaria three times a year, and her 12-year-old daughter twice as often as that. The family then has to spend what is needed for treatment.

“If there’s a chicken in the house you sell it,” she said.

A chicken might be worth 600 Kenyan shillings, or $5; a trip to the medical clinic, with transport, a diagnostic test and drugs for malaria, will cost at least that much. Repeated bouts of malaria keep children out of school and adults from working; they wipe out savings. Ms. Oketeti said she must stay home from the fields she farms to care for a sick family member for a few days every month.

Dr. Ochomo and his team recently received data from the midpoint of the clinical trial of spatial repellents. Malaria cases were significantly lower in families that had them compared to those that had devices that used placebo repellents. If that trend holds, the next challenge will be convincing the W.H.O. to endorse the use of spatial repellents, then the Kenyan government to buy them.

It won’t be hard to convince people in Busia to use them, though, he said.

“People already know that nets are not enough, they need something more, and they’re happy to see us,” he said. “They say, ‘Finally, someone is coming to try to help with this.’”

Stephanie Nolen is a global health reporter for The Times. More about Stephanie Nolen

Malin Fezehai, a visual reporter, has worked in more than 30 countries. Her photographic work has the common denominator of displacement. More about Malin Fezehai

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 1, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Mosquito Wars: Climate Breeds Deadlier ThreatOrder Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

osquitoes Are a Growing Public Health Threat, Reversing Years of Progress

Climate change and the rapid evolution of the insect have helped drive up malaria deaths and brought dengue and other mosquito-borne viruses to places that never had to worry about them.