Is Dallas Doing Enough To Stop West Nile?
DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) - Jon Whitten is jogging again a month after a mosquito bite landed the Dallas airline pilot in the hospital. "It was pretty bad there for three or four days. It was miserable," Whitten said. The 49-year-old lives in Lakewood near an algae-covered pond where mosquitos tested positive for the West Nile Virus.
Whitten was one of the first confirmed cases this summer and is still recovering. "It was like the flu times three or four or five," he said.
While Dallas County has taken the lead on informing the public about the West Nile outbreak, the City of Dallas has only three workers responsible for testing and spraying 385 square miles. The city says it has sufficient resources to combat West Nile. But residents say, when they asked the city to spray the pond after their neighbor became sick, they were told it would be placed on a waiting list.
Janet Brown is one of those who emailed the city for help. "It took quite a while. We were on a long list, so we kept waiting on our turn," Brown said.
That may be because the city has only three full time environmental specialists to test and spray neighborhoods. We checked other cities and found Houston has eight full-time workers, eight seasonal workers and two assistants. San Antonio has nine city employees who spray every day. Even smaller cities like Austin have five full-time workers along with two extra for the summer months when the risk of mosquito spread diseases is greatest.
Residents in a neighborhood where cans of mosquito repellent are the front line defense question whether the city could do more. Whitten and his neighbors say the city told them it would put up signs and send out flyers after spraying, but neither happened.
A city spokesperson says its crews are "able to spray nine areas every week."
But, in neighborhoods where West Nile hits close to home, that may not be enough.
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