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Prevention is the Key to a Mosquito-Proof New York City
By Mayor Rudy Giuliani

Now that Spring is here, New York City has announced its comprehensive West Nile virus prevention and control plan for 2001. The plan is preventive in orientation and emphasizes tracking the virus, eliminating mosquito breeding grounds and educating the public.

In less than two years, New York City has developed a state-of-the-art program to protect the city from West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne diseases. Since the first appearance of the virus here in 1999, the City's Health Department has worked closely with Federal, State, and other City agencies to effectively monitor and control this disease.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) praised the City on its activities last spring, even before the recurrence of the West Nile virus. Through our preventive measures, the CDC believes that we kept down the number of people who were infected by the virus last year.

This year, the City will continue and even enhance the preventive work it carried out last year and will again emphasize the importance of breeding site reduction and treating areas of standing water with larvicides.

The Health Department will collaborate with elected officials, other agencies and large property owners to eliminate standing water in empty lots, tire piles and other containers. This will be augmented by applying larvicide to potential breeding sites where water cannot be eliminated, including waste water treatment plants, parks, sewers and 150,000 catch basins across the city.

A large-scale public information campaign (Mosquito-Proof NYC) will urge residents to reduce mosquito breeding sites around homes and businesses, and to report major potential breeding sites. Unclogging roof gutters, emptying unused swimming pools, discarding old tires, buckets and other containers that hold water, and changing bird baths at least once a week will significantly help the City's efforts.

We are also going to vigorously enforce a resolution adopted by the City Board of Health last year that makes water accumulations a public health nuisance subject to immediate abatement and fines from $200 to $2,000.

When infected birds are detected this year, rapid response teams will move in to take all preventive and reduction measures, such as spreading larvicide and removing pools of water.

If we find that the virus is continuing to intensify despite all our preventive efforts, pesticide spraying will begin in targeted green areas, such as parks and golf courses, where mosquitoes are likely to breed.

Last year, pesticides were used to cover a two-mile radius, about as far as a mosquito can fly. But new data indicates that a one-mile spraying radius is sufficient. The public will be notified of spray schedules in advance, which should allow sufficient time to take any necessary precautions to reduce pesticide exposure.

We know that all these preventive measures make a very important difference. And we really have to not look to spraying as a panacea, but look to prevention as the way to minimize the need to spray. Prevention will have the greatest impact.

To help eliminate mosquito breeding sites and to report standing water, New Yorkers should call the automated West Nile Virus Information Line (1-877-WNV-4NYC). The information line will be regularly updated, and live operators are available weekdays from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Updated West Nile information can also be found on the Health Department's website at nyc.gov/health.