With Funds Dwindling, Agricultural Experiment Station Continues Mosquito Testing

It was perhaps coincidence that in May’s rainy weeks, which boosted the mosquito population, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s “Plan B” budget lay in wait to eliminate the scientific research station that since 1997 has trapped mosquitoes and studied two rare viruses that can infect and kill people.

If the State Employees Bargaining Agent Coalition and the governor can’t agree on concessions, the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, and a long list of other budget lines, will receive no funding. A state spokesman said that so far, the station is funded.

“Right now we are not doing Plan B and we expect the concession package to be accepted by the SEBAC unions,” said Gian-Carl Casa, undersecretary for legislative affairs. “If for some reason the concession package fails, everything is on the table except tax increases.”

The agricultural experiment station studies Eastern equine encephalitis, which has lived in birds and mosquitoes for probably hundreds of years, but became known in and around Stonington in 1996. EEE’s fatality rate is 30 percent in humans who catch it through a mosquito bite, so it has remained a public health threat in eastern Connecticut despite no known human cases. Since 1964, EEE deaths number five in Rhode Island, 36 in Massachusetts, and three in New York.

From birds to mosquitoes

The station also tracks West Nile virus, from Africa, which arrived in 1999. It first showed up in New York, and, that September, researchers from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station found West Nile virus in its primary carriers, crows, after they started dying from Greenwich to Madison. The researchers published their work in the journal Science, and Malloy, who was then mayor of Stamford, visited the station in New Haven and looked at the virus through an electron microscope.

West Nile is more common but less serious. It kills 5 percent of the humans who become infected. Last year, 11 people contracted it in Connecticut and recovered. Last year’s cases in neighboring states added up to 128 (and four deaths) in New York and seven cases (not fatal) in Massachusetts.

Both of these viruses live in birds and pass to mosquitoes that bite them. Research has shown that both of the viruses live through the winter: West Nile stays in mosquitoes and passes to their eggs, giving birth to entire crops of infected insects. How EEE makes it through the cold months, researchers aren’t sure.

The possibility of cutting the agricultural experiment station has led to protests from many environmental advocacy groups. The prospect of removing the nation’s oldest such research facility threatens several long-term research programs at the station, including tree, insect, and plant studies.

Funding dries up

Mosquito testing is a matter of public health, said Theodore G. Andreadis, chief medical entomologist and head of the New Haven-based agricultural experiment station’s entomology department. Andreadis built the state testing program after an outbreak of Eastern equine encephalitis in Rhode Island in 1996 and a state law passed the next year.

Connecticut’s testing program intensified after two people died in New York in 1999—infected with what turned out to be West Nile virus, from Africa. They’d gotten mosquito bites. The virus entered the mosquitoes via crows and other birds.

(The Connecticut departments of Public Health and Environmental Protection, and other departments, are involved in aspects of the mosquito management program, which include plans for spraying in hot spots, monitoring human and bird cases, and notifying the public.)

Andreadis said that after several years of government support, federal funding for the mosquito trapping, testing and research his station does has been cut or stopped. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control had given $300,000 (more than the state’s current contribution—barring Plan B—of $230,000). The CDC funding was cut by two-thirds. And other federal funds, including an earmark of half a million, stopped last year.

For this season, the station is dealing with the federal shortfall by drawing on a rainy-day fund from collaborators, known as “industry funds.” These funds will run out after this season, Andreadis said.

 “I don’t want to dismantle this program because I would be in a position where I’d have to make a decision to eliminate trapping locations,” Andreadis said. “If we do that and we don’t have a presence in certain areas or a significant number of traps in our focal areas, I’m really afraid we would have virus activity that we would not be able to detect.”

What would likely happen if the state did not know where mosquitoes carried these viruses, he said, is that officials would learn when someone got sick. “We’d be chasing after it and it would be too late,” he said.

 “The program we have now is fine tuned,” he said. “There are very rarely any surprises. We can always detect a virus in our mosquitoes prior to it building up to high levels where it results in human infections.”

Take precautions

Disease experts suggest avoiding mosquitoes when the species that carry the viruses bite, at dawn and dusk. The first fatality from West Nile virus in New York hit a man who got up early to ramble in his garden. Insect repellents containing DEET work but high concentrations are considered hazardous for children.

Maps

To understand the presence of Eastern equine encephalitis and the spread of West Nile virus west from New Haven County, review the statistics and maps going back a decade at this page: http://www.ct.gov/caes/cwp/view.asp?a=2819&q=377446&caesNav=|. Scroll down to find all of the links. Note: the state tests mosquitoes in half of the towns.

Locations of eastern Connecticut state mosquito:

Groton: Submarine Base

Guilford: Moose Hill Road

Haddam: Little City Road

Killingworth: Chittenden Road

Ledyard: Cedar Swamp

Lyme: Cedar Lake

Madison: Route 80, Cedar Swamp

North Branford: Cedar Pond

North Stonington: Pawcatuck River, Bell Cedar Swamp, Exit 93 (of I-95), Wyassup Lake

Old Lyme: Great Island

Stonington: Barn Island, Stonington High School, Coogan Blvd.

Waterford-New London: At the two-town boundary

Westbrook: Willard Avenue