Medfly Fears Expand : 2nd Found in Orange County Trap

A fertile Mediterranean fruit fly has been discovered in Westminster, a find that could signal a drastic expansion of the crop-destroying pest’s path of infestation, Orange County agricultural officials said today.

The non-pregnant fly was found in a trap late Thursday afternoon just south of the Garden Grove Freeway on Edwards Avenue, 10 miles south of the spot where the county’s only other Medfly was found.

County officials immediately began to blanket the region around Westminster with more than 1,000 Medfly traps in an effort to determine the severity of the infestation.

They were still waiting this morning to learn whether the state will order malathion pesticide spraying for the Westminster region. State officials on Thursday, conceding that the problem is worse than once projected, revised their plans and ordered repeated sprayings--as many as 16--for some infested areas in Los Angeles County.

“We’re waiting to hear how this will be treated,” county entomologist Nick Nisson said. “It’s a very bad sign. This is an area removed from the other (detections), and that makes the problem appear much more serious and widespread.”

Entomologists dissected the Medfly this morning at the regional Medfly Project in El Monte and determined that the insect was not pregnant but that it was fertile and capable of reproducing.

“It’s the next worst thing (to a pregnant Medfly); it’s a wild fly, and we certainly didn’t want to see that,” Nisson said.

How to respond to the detection of fertile but non-pregnant Medflies is a gray area in state protocol, officials say.

“Because (the Westminster fly) is an unmated female, the decision might be made just to trap and see if there are more out there,” said William Edwards, a Los Angeles agricultural commissioner who is active in the region-wide Medfly Project.

“Or we could go out and treat the area (with malathion) immediately. It could go either way,” he said.

Meanwhile, state agricultural officials said this morning that they will respray a 10-square-mile area of La Habra, Brea and Fullerton next Tuesday night, along with previously announced spraying that night of a new infestation area around La Habra Heights.

The 10-square-mile region--the first ever targeted in Orange County--was sprayed with more than 500 gallons of a malathion and insect bait mixture last week, alarming some residents who worried about health effects.

State officials maintain that the Medfly pesticide mix poses no risk to humans in the doses used in spraying, although its use is under review by the federal government.

Since the Medfly reappeared in Southern California in August, state officials have sprayed roughly 250 square miles from the San Fernando Valley to northern Orange County, affecting about a million residents.

State officials are trying--unsuccessfully, they concede--to stop the further spread of the crop-attacking pest and prevent a repeat of the 1981 infestation that ravaged the state’s agricultural economy.