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Sometimes it’s hard to get people to talk on the radio, but not this time. Not when the subject was mosquitoes.
“They have been biting me every time I step out of the car.”
“I have been eaten alive.”
“I have mosquito bites all over, the babies have been bitten by mosquitoes.”
There’s good news and bad news about the mosquito outbreak. The good news: the mosquitoes we’re seeing now are a different breed than normal. They’re called floodwater mosquitoes and they don’t carry diseases like the West Nile. The bad news: because they don’t carry diseases, many local counties aren’t planning to spray. This is Harris County Judge Ed Emmett talking about what his experts have told him.
“They’re saying that spraying at this point doesn’t make sense. You’ve got a cold front coming in a couple days. By the time you go around and spray the entire county, how much can you cover in that period of time?”
Jeff Kelina is a doctor who works in the ER at the Methodist Hospital. He says people are getting bit all over their bodies and this bread of mosquito leaves bigger welts. But if you’re worried about problems say from perhaps being bitten too many times. Kelina says not to worry.
So what many people want to know is how do we find ourselves in this situation in the first place in a year when there wasn’t much rain.
“The eggs were laid for these mosquitoes a long time ago and because we went through a heavy drought the eggs never hatched.”
But then we got that big dose of rain two weeks ago and like something out of a horror movie: all the eggs hatched at once and are now wreaking havoc on the Houston population.