Mosquito Abatement
Food Chain Radio Show #1230
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Mosquito Abatement
Guest: Ken Klemme, Manager, Northern Salinas Valley Mosquito Abatement District
As anyone who has watched Shark Week can attest, few creatures can match the killing ferocity of the great white shark. That said, sharks of all kinds only kill about 10 people a year.
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Mosquito Abatement – Can we fight off the blood-sucking mosquito?
The most ferocious killer on earth is the one that kills at least 750,000 people every year. That ferocious killer of people is, the tiny little mosquito!
Incidentally, the second biggest killer of people is people, and they only kill about half as many people!
What makes the mosquito so dangerous is not its bite or sting, as it does neither, but rather its probe. That probe is not sharp and rigid like a needle; its flexible and bendable. The mosquito uses that probe to search for a blood vein beneath the skin, and when it finds one, inserts the probe and begins sucking up the blood.
What makes the mosquito’s probe so dangerous is that it transmits and spreads diseases the mosquito sucked up from other victims. Those diseases include Chikungunya, Dengue Fever, Encephalitis, Malaria, West Nile, Yellow Fever and Zika. In vectoring these diseases, the tiny little mosquito kills upwards of three-quarters of a million people every year. And so we ask, can we fight off the blood-sucking mosquito?
Leave a comment below: Which frightens you most: mosquito or tick?
Nationally syndicated Food Chain Radio airs live Saturday mornings 9-10AM Pacific.
Listeners can learn about general mosquito management from these newly-revised University of California guidelines: http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7451.html. For specific guidelines associated with ponds and water features, review this UC ANR blog post: https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=14396