On July 21 Patrick Foley wrote: > As for Sacramento-Yolo West Nile spraying [in August 2005]: > The Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito Abatement District carefully avoided a > public discussion of their spraying in Davis, the home of UCDavis, until > after their very dubious spraying strategy was already decided. When > they did attempt to conduct a no-public-discussion "informational" > meeting to a room full of scientists, they were met with a good deal of > scorn. Very little serious epidemiological work has gone into the > spraying plans.
Yet after listening to the arguments of the anti-spray segment of the academic community at UC Davis for the past year, the Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito Abatement District has still decided in favor of aerially spraying the city of Davis, including the UC Davis campus, this summer. In fact, a Davis newspaper announced today that the aerial spraying of Davis will take place later this week: http://www.davisenterprise.com/articles/2006/07/31/news/153new1.txt "On Thursday and Friday nights, airplanes will spray pesticide over Davis and Woodland in an effort to slow the spread of West Nile virus." "The Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito and Vector Control District, working with UC Davis, will trap for mosquitoes before and after spraying. Last year in Sacramento County, spraying was successful in killing better than 75 percent of the mosquito population." The chemical insecticide contains piperonyl butoxide. According to http://www.stopwestnilesprayingnow.org/Risk.htm piperonyl butoxide "has been shown to induce DNA damage in several different assays for genotoxicity and also to function as an endocrine disruptor." Evidently the Sacramento-Yolo governement public health authorities has not found the anti-spray arguments of the academic community very compelling. Paul Cherubini El Dorado, Calif.
