Medfly War Over, a New Battle Looms : Infestation: Fruit ban will be lifted today though some say pest isn’t dead yet. And Orange County faces a new quarantine, for the peach fruit fly.

Agriculture officials declared Thursday that their controversial, 16-month battle with the Mediterranean fruit fly in Southern California finally has ended in victory--an assertion that some entomologists believe ignores evidence that the pest is entrenched in the region.

But even as the officials announced the lifting of the last Medfly fruit quarantines, they prepared to put in place a new, 75-square-mile quarantine zone in central Orange County to head off the spread of the area’s latest pest, the peach fruit fly.

Trappers have now found 21 peach fruit flies in a square-mile area of Fountain Valley since late last month, with the latest find confirmed Thursday. A cousin of the notorious Medfly, the peach fly is thought to be as potentially devastating to crops but can be more easily wiped out through pesticide applications on utility poles and trees.

The new quarantine, banning the transport of certain fruits within or outside of an eight-city area around Fountain Valley, may go into effect today, or at the latest by Tuesday.

Despite the flurry of peach fly finds, officials said they aren’t worried.

“We’re very confident that the peach fly will be eradicated, easily eradicated. That’s the beauty of it compared to the Medfly,” County Deputy Agriculture Commissioner Jim Lefeuvre said, following confirmation of the latest find.

Because it is not as easily drawn to bait mixtures, the Medfly proved a tougher prey than other bugs, prompting more severe remedies--such as the unpopular malathion sprayings. But all that seemed largely forgotten as officials closed the book on this chapter of the Medfly war.

As they claimed victory, officials announced that the last vestige of the $52-million eradication campaign--a state and federal quarantine that banned the free movement of home-grown fruit through some areas--will be lifted today.

“We’re here to celebrate that we’ve eradicated the Medfly from California and unless there is another introduction, it will remain eradicated,” said Jack Parnell, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who flew to California to join local and state officials in a round of congratulatory speeches. “We are absolutely appreciative of the patience of the people of the Los Angeles Basin.”

The campaign began after discovery of a single fly near Dodger Stadium. At its height, the effort required pesticide spraying over several hundred square miles of residences; a debate over priorities raged between pesticide-wary urbanites and the state’s farmers, who feared that the crop-damaging pest would move into prime agricultural regions. In the end, farmland was largely spared.

Officials told reporters that the campaign had left a positive legacy of greater understanding of how to battle the pest and keep it out of California. Some scientists were skeptical of such analyses, mindful of a new Medfly theory that has raised fundamental questions about any eradication tactics.

The theory, advanced by one of five scientists who advised the eradication campaign and based largely on statistical evidence, suggests that pockets of the state have been infested with Medflies for roughly 15 years and remain so today. Only a porous system of detecting flies makes it appear they were eradicated from time to time, theorizes UC Davis entomologist James R. Carey.

“It’s a short-term victory, but in a biological sense, I’m skeptical,”Carey said in an earlier interview. “They’re going to come back.”

Carey isn’t the only skeptic.

“We just won another battle, but the war is never going to be over,” said Richard Rice, also a UC Davis entomologist and another member of the state’s science advisory panel.

Among Orange County citizens who unsuccessfully fought the state’s malathion campaign, the mood was no more optimistic.

“They keep saying the little bugger’s gone, and he keeps showing up again,” said Jerry Yudelson, a local environmental consultant who made an attack on malathion spraying a platform of his unsuccessful bid for the state Assembly in the June primary.

Mollie Haines, a Garden Grove homemaker who became a leader in the local anti-malathion movement, said she’d love to say goodby to the Medfly for good but doesn’t think it’s that easy.

“The whole thing was just unbelievable, having your life ruled by what night the helicopters were coming,” she said. “I hope we never have to go through such a thing again as that, but I think a lot of this talk about victory over the Medfly is just PR. We could be back in that same boat again.”

At the official ceremony, held at the county agriculture office in El Monte, skepticism was kept to a minimum.

“The scientific evidence says today that we have eradicated the fly,” said Henry J. Voss, director of the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “I’m happy and relieved and proud of the people who worked in this eradication.”

Nonetheless, Voss conceded that more Medflies will be found and agreed that exclusion and trapping programs are under-funded, but he added: “When my team wins, that’s a victory, even if they lost last week and will lose again next week.”

The declaration of victory was founded on the lack of discovery of anything but isolated flies in four breeding cycles, or four months. The last fly was trapped Oct. 1 in Riverside County, and it did not prompt pesticide spraying.

Parnell said the end of the battle heralds a shift in strategy to preventing the Medfly from entering the country in the first place.

“The eradication programs are going to have to be replaced with exclusion strategies that work,” he said. “Exclusion is the name of the game.”

Parnell said the USDA already has bolstered its overseas fruit inspection system with the use of a fruit-sniffing dog to check first-class mail from Hawaii.

Nonetheless, some officials were disappointed that efforts to prevent the Medfly from entering the state and improve the state’s admittedly leaky fly-trapping network have fallen short of earlier, more ambitious expectations.

The state’s five-member science advisory panel had recommended placing as many as 25 fly traps for every square mile to ensure quick warning of a potential outbreak. Voss, citing budget restraints, said that the trapping levels will drop next year to five per square ile.

And one official challenged Parnell’s description of a beefed-up inspection system. “One beagle does not an exclusion program make,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.

Voss said he believes that the state has the ability now to prevent another large infestation because of experience gleaned from the Southern California battle and the completion of a $7-million sterile fruit fly breeding facility. This, he said, will allow the state to handle major infestations with only limited malathion spraying.

Southern California’s Medfly infestation began on July 20, 1989, when a county inspector found a single Medfly in a fruit fly trap in Elysian Park. The discovery came just a month after agriculture officials had declared victory over the Medfly in a 10-month-long infestation in West Los Angeles that was limited to 35 square miles.

The infestation continued to spread, reaching Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties for the first time in history.