Pesticide use in the City of St. Louis.

• Author: McKeel, Daniel

[The following is from a public forum on pesticide spraying for West Nile Virus 'held by the Gateway Green Alliance of St. Louis, Missouri on February 5, 2003]

The important formula is risk versus benefit of pesticide spraying to control West Nile Virus diseases. After studying this issue, I believe the risk of pesticide "fogging" (aerial spraying from trucks) far outweighs the benefit to control mosquito populations that transmit the virus to people. First, I want to review the latest medical data on the prevalence and incidence of West Nile Virus illnesses. Next I want to tell you about new data concerning pesticides and emerging evidence that one pesticide, rotenone (which is not using in the St. Louis spraying program), causes Parkinson's disease.

The West Nile Virus story

West Nile Virus (WNV), a flavivirus, is not strictly a St. Louis problem; it is global. At the time WNV was sweeping across America starting in 1999, it was also spreading in Romania, Russia and Israel from its endemic sites in Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. In the US, WNV spread from New York City starting in 1999 across the country from East to the West Coast.

Most persons who get infected with WNV are asymptomatic. A large majority of symptomatic people develop a self-limited febrile illness (viremia) with non-specific flu-like symptoms. A third group, 0.1-1% of the total, develop more serious brain inflammation (meningitis, encephalitis) with neurologic impairment as primary symptoms.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website (www.cdc.gov) provides a summary of state by state total WNV infections and deaths to date that have been reported to them. Thus far, the CDC has recorded 4007 total cases and 263 deaths due to WNV. This a fatality rate of 6.6%. This number of WNV deaths should be compared to more than 200,000 US deaths due to influenza virus during 2002. For the year, Illinois had 836 cases and 56, Missouri had 169 cases and 5 deaths, and Kentucky had 75 cases and 5 deaths. The high Illinois to Missouri case/death rate was also observed during the St. Louis viral encephalitis epidemic that first hit the City 50 years ago. St. Louis viral encephalitis is still with us (endemic), but the peak incidence of yearly new cases has sharply declined from the earlier epidemic.

Problems with pesticide spraying

We learned when meeting with the City that 96% of the sprayed agent (ANVIL 2+2 brand of the pyrethrin compound sumithrin) is an oil-based...