They’re Back: Medfly and Aerial Spraying : Infestation: Groans are heard from foes of the flights after the pest turns up in Echo Park.

Just when the people of Echo Park and surrounding environs thought it was safe to venture outside in their supposedly Medfly-free neighborhoods came the word Monday that another bug has been discovered and more malathion spraying has been ordered.

“I can’t believe, I can’t believe , they’re doing this again ,” moaned Patty Prickett, an Echo Park resident who lives about three blocks from where the most recent Mediterranean fruit fly was found--and a short distance from where the first fly in Southern California’s current infestation was found in July of last year.

“God, I can’t believe they’re throwing more money, good money after bad, into a program that so obviously is not working. It’s ridiculous.”

Prickett, an environmentalist who as coordinator of Residents Against Spraying Pesticides opposes the use of malathion, planned to stay away from her home when the helicopters douse her neighborhood Thursday.

“I’m not putting my kid through this anymore,” she said--not after last year’s spraying of her home and the spraying of her son’s school.

A 14-square-mile swath west of Dodger Stadium and including parts of Echo Park and Silver Lake will be sprayed at least three times starting Thursday, officials announced Monday. It was also Echo Park, a heavily Latino neighborhood of apartment buildings and single-family bungalows, that was first sprayed last August at the start of the lengthy battle to eradicate the pest.

Andy Gonzalez, who manages an appliance store, remembers the malathion treatments of last year when “you could see it coming down.” But he is resigned to it starting over again.

“I guess it has to be done,” Gonzalez said as he and his 7-year-old nephew, Anthony, walked their dog, Mugsy, alongside Echo Park. “I guess people get used to it, like shootings and killings, it comes with the territory.”

Similar sentiments were echoed by Eddie Ganamey, 77, a retired grocery clerk who became concerned recently when one of his apricot trees bore wormy fruit.

“That’s the law, you gotta do it,” said Ganamey, sitting at a picnic table in the park. “The government is doing the best it can.”

Over in the playground, Maria Medrano, a housewife, fretted as her 3-year-old daughter, Cindy Estrada, played on the slide.

“If it is killing the pests, that’s fine, but for the children it must be bad,” Medrano said.

In Silver Lake, Marty Burke, 40, a costumer who says she is pregnant, worried about taking in her two dogs and two cats, and said that the unanswered questions and the public’s lack of choice are what bother her about malathion spraying.

“It’s the uncertainty of it,” Burke said as she and her friend, Dawn Line, walked their Rhodesian Ridgebacks. “We try to be liberal . . . but it’s distressing.”

Connie Charlton, an actress who has lived in Silver Lake for 12 years, also wants to know more about long-term effects--despite government assurances that the low concentrations of malathion that are being used in Los Angeles are safe.

“I want the fruit to be right, but my bottom line is what is this doing to us, to me,” she said. “Is my face going to fall off some day? They don’t know what it does to people, but they keep spraying us. . . . I just hope I’ll be inside when they spray.”