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File photo by MIAMI HERALD
Fran Middlebrooks, a groundskeeper at Pinecrest Gardens in Miami, former home of the historic Parrot Jungle, uses a blower in August to spray pesticide to kill mosquitoes.
File photo by MIAMI HERALD
Fran Middlebrooks, a groundskeeper at Pinecrest Gardens in Miami, former home of the historic Parrot Jungle, uses a blower in August to spray pesticide to kill mosquitoes.
MIAMI — As the Zika virus spread across Miami-Dade County this summer, a tiny staff of 17 that handles mosquito control for nearly 2.7 million people was outgunned, overwhelmed and maybe even a victim of its own success: In 2009 and 2010, the county managed to dodge a dengue outbreak that infected more than 100 people in Key West and four years later evaded a rash of chikungunya.
But Zika was something different, a mosquito-borne virus with terrifying implications for expectant parents that had ravaged parts of South America.
As early as February, the county led the state in travel-related cases. In April, federal scientists issued dire predictions that ground zero for Zika in the U.S. would likely be Miami, a mecca for both Latin American tourists and the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmit the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly warned it was a public health threat that called for serious advance planning.
Despite the early alarms, records show Miami-Dade largely proceeded with business as usual as the summer mosquito season approached.
Mosquito staff set up a network of monitoring traps along the coast and marshes — a seasonal strategy designed to track nuisance biters but do little to assess the urban, disease-carrying Zika mosquitoes. A five-page action plan was drafted — with an initial prevention campaign focused on telling residents to dump and cover containers where mosquitoes breed, a strategy that almost never works. Mayor Carlos Gimenez told staff to do what was needed and called for a $300,000 bump in the mosquito control division’s $1.7 million budget — a modest 18 percent boost that wouldn’t deliver more money until next year.
Other tactics, which better-financed mosquito control districts implemented, were not pursued. No additional surveys were done to scope out breeding grounds. No special traps were distributed to track the presence of Aedes aegypti. No larvicide application, or neighborhood fogging outside the marsh mosquito zone in South Miami-Dade, was performed to knock down numbers in advance of the coming mosquito season. The county plan, for the most part, was to step up measures if and when Zika got a local foothold.
Outside experts say Miami-Dade’s could have done more. Given the dense urban population, preventing Zika was probably impossible. More aggressive and expensive tactics might have helped limit public exposure, but would have busted the budget in Miami-Dade, which has cut mosquito control spending in half since 2007. The county now spends about 64 cents each year for every resident.
“When you consider the population of Miami-Dade and the area you’re dealing with, you can’t do anything of any consequence toward controlling mosquitoes with that little bit of money. It’s just not possible,” said Ed Fussell, who helped pioneer aerial larviciding as head of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District between 1997 to 2011.
As the outbreak spread, the county juggled a fast-emerging public health crisis and public relations nightmare. The five-page plan posted on the division’s website was removed after Raquel Regalado, a mayoral candidate opposing Gimenez, complained in a televised debate that too little was done to prepare for the outbreak. Officials discontinued compiling daily mosquito reports after the Miami Herald requested them, then resumed them in a new form that emphasized wider control efforts implemented after the local outbreak.
Throughout July, as travel-related cases mounted, trucks fogged just 10 locations countywide. Once health agencies confirmed local transmission in Wynwood on July 29, the small mosquito control division scrambled to confront the outbreak. The daily reports show the division dispatched three to five inspectors with backpack foggers in the days that followed and deployed a truck fogger four times.
The summer battle has shown the proposed $300,000 bump estimated to for expanded mosquito control was absurdly low.
Gimenez now estimates that the county will spend about $10 million this year to fight Zika. The state has set aside, but not yet sent, another $5 million.