Hasta La Gadget!

Massachusetts boasted a 60 percent kill rate. Vermont claimed up to 69 percent. And, in Texas, a preliminary report suggested that aerial spraying of pesticides eliminated 93 percent of disease-carrying mosquitoes in some neighborhoods.

Over the last couple months, officials from across the country have engaged airplanes armed with pesticides in an attempt to battle mosquitoes that carry the West Nile virus, on track to infect more people this year than ever before in the U.S., and eastern equine encephalitis, a less common but generally more dangerous disease. The decisions to spray have often been made under heated opposition from residents and some scientists concerned about what they say is an ineffective and unsafe strategy. Nevertheless, in at least a few cases, officials subsequently reported high success rates and few health complaints.

“This is what we hoped to see. It’s a meaningful reduction,” said Roger Nasci, chief of the arboviral diseases branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to very preliminary data from Dallas that suggested mosquito kills as high as 93 percent from aerial sprays in late August. “All things together, no one is going to say it is 100 percent positively safe. But the level of concern for risks to human health is low and certainly outweighed by the risk of West Nile.”

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