Before the lockdowns of COVID, there were the fears of Zika virus, West Nile and other mosquito-borne ailments. And those fears returned with the news that a 7-year-old Alabama girl died after a mosquito bite.
The bite left the second grader with Eastern equine encephalitis, EEE, an often fatal infection that causes inflammation of the brain. The virus is spread by the bite of a mosquito infected with EEE.
After the little girl's death in Spanish Fort, Ala., the Alabama Department of Public Health confirmed that a second person has a case of this disease. In response, Spanish Fort City Council voted to hire Arkansas-based VDCI Mosquito Management to apply different kinds of sprays 'aimed at killing different species of mosquitos.'
But the heat blanketing Alabama, New Orleans, Texas and as far into the Midwest as Chicago and Detroit, is making mosquito control more difficult.
NBC News reported that as intense heat and high humidity bring bigger infestations of mosquitoes, they're also getting harder to kill because some of the pesky creatures are becoming resistant to insecticides.
"It's not a good sign," Roxanne Connelly of the CDC told NBC. "We're losing some of our tools that we normally rely on to control infected mosquitoes."
They're not only more resistant to chemicals, there's also been an increase this summer of mosquitoes carrying viruses like West Nile -- and that is "very concerning," Connelly of the CDC told NBC. "This is something different than what we've been seeing for the past few years."
