Photo courtesy City of Plano
Plano (WBAP/KLIF News) – Plano has released fish into a dozen lakes and ponds that will eat mosquito larva. The move aims to reduce the population of mosquitoes heading into the season when cases of West Nile Virus are most common.
“We’ve always started early in the year,” says Director of Environmental Health and Sustainability Rachel Patterson. “We usually start trapping just before the mosquito population increases.”
This year, Patterson says mosquito control takes on added significance because of the arrival of Zika virus. Zika is spread by a different type of mosquito that is more common during the day.
“We used to tell people, ‘dusk til dawn, keep covered up.’ Now, we tell people to cover up all the time,” she says. “The Aedes species that carries the Zika virus, they’re day-biters.”
Through last week, the Centers for Disease Control had confirmed 426 cases of Zika in the United States. Each case was associated with travel or through sexual contact with someone who had been traveling.
Texas has recorded eight cases of Zika.
