With summer around the corner, Will County health officials are gearing up to battle one of the season’s potentially deadly nemeses: mosquito-borne West Nile virus.
The county Health Department plans to operate 20 mosquito monitoring sites this spring and summer in an effort to identify potential “hot spots” for the Culex mosquito, the species most often implicated in transmitting the disease, said Michael Vollmer, Will’s environmental health director.
Once spots most likely to harbor disease-bearing mosquitoes are identified, prevention-control measures can be taken to eliminate the threat. They include issuing municipalities and townships cases of environmentally friendly larvicide, an insecticide that attacks mosquito larvae to reduce activity, Vollmer said.
“Weather conditions will ultimately dictate how much West Nile virus we will have to contend with this summer,” he said, noting that hot, dry weather in the latter part of summer is especially conducive for Culex mosquito production.
Regardless, “we’ll be doing all we can to minimize the threat to humans through public education, mosquito monitoring and bird surveillance,” he added.
Tuesday was the first day health agencies across Illinois could submit dead birds to the state to test for the presence of the virus blamed for 10 deaths in Illinois last year, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Mosquitoes become infected with the West Nile virus when they feed on infected birds. Crows, blue jays and robins are especially susceptible to the disease, state health officials say. The mosquitoes transmit the virus to humans through their bite.
In Will County, people can report dead bird sightings on the Health Department’s 24-hour West Nile virus information hot line, 815-740-7631.
The county health agency expects to spend more than $116,000 on West Nile virus prevention and control this year, department spokesman Vic Reato said. The money will come from $2.5 million in state grants made to local health departments.
Cook County was awarded more than $566,000 for its mosquito surveillance and control efforts, DuPage more than $207,000 and Lake County more than $148,000. McHenry and Kane Counties received $61,000 and $94,000, respectively. Funding for the grants comes from a special 50-cent fee the state levies on new tire purchases.
Monitoring sites in Will are in Joliet, Shorewood, Plainfield, Lockport, Bolingbrook Romeoville, Homer Glen, New Lenox, Minooka, Frankfort, Manhattan, Peotone, Mokena, Wheatland Township, Elwood, Crete, Wilmington and University Park. All are expected to be up and running by May 14, Reato said.
Mosquito samples will be collected from each site at least twice a week and analyzed at the Will County Environmental Health Laboratory complex in Joliet, he said. Of 708 mosquito batches tested last year, 63 were positive for West Nile virus, he said. Nearly half of the positive samples were from traps in Joliet, Romeoville, Mokena and Manhattan, Reato said.
Although many victims of West Nile have few if any symptoms, the disease, which spread to the United States in the late 1990s from Africa, West Asia and the Middle East, can be fatal, especially for people over 50 with weakened immune systems, officials say.
Illinois has been especially hard hit by the disease. In 2002, the state topped the nation with 884 human cases and 67 fatalities and finished second to California in 2005 with 252 reported human infections and 12 deaths, according to the state health agency. Last year, there were 215 confirmed cases in Illinois, including 86 in Cook County, 18 in Will, 43 in DuPage, 11 in Lake, six in McHenry and four in Kane County.
Although West Nile virus is most prevalent in summer and early fall, it’s not too early to take steps to reduce the chances of contacting the disease, including eliminating sources of standing water, officials say.
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sziemba@tribune.com
