Fly Swatters : Officials Say Battle Against Mediterranean Pest Is Nearly Won

After four months and eight aerial pesticide sprayings, agriculture officials say the battle to eradicate the crop-destroying Mediterranean fruit fly from Ventura County is showing strong signs of success.

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With near-universal cooperation from the county’s agricultural and political leaders and only minor protests from some residents living in or near the spray zone, the effort to stamp out the exotic pest is only about two months away from completion, officials said.

Some Camarillo residents remain vehemently opposed to the malathion sprayings, believing they poses serious health risks. But officials stand by their assertions that the chemical is safe for use and is accomplishing the goal of eradicating the Medfly.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with the way things have gone so far,” said Doug Hendrix, a spokesman for the state and federal Cooperative Medfly Project. “But we’re eager to get the operation over with and get out of the way of people up there.”

Hendrix said a measure of the program’s success has been that no insects have been found in traps since Nov. 21, when two were collected. A network of more than 1,500 traps spreads out over the 86-square-mile quarantine zone.

Since the first two fertile female Medflies were found Sept. 28 in an orchard on the grounds of St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, a total of 66 flies have been found.

Although at least five more aerial sprayings are scheduled, Ventura County Agricultural Commissioner W. Earl McPhail said that, short of another outbreak, the battle to save the county’s $848-million agriculture industry is nearly won.

But the operation has not been cheap, officials say.

At $90,000 a mission, the state and federal governments will share equally the $1.1-million cost for the Ventura County eradication effort. That figure does not include the costs of the three dozen or so state and county employees who check the fly traps and enforce regulations in the quarantine zone.

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The combined state and federal budget for Medfly eradication in California, shared equally by both governments, is $34 million for the 1994-95 fiscal year.

To date, 7,064 gallons of the bait--comprised mostly of corn syrup--has been sprayed over the 16-square-mile eradication zone in eastern Camarillo and Somis. In all, about 740 gallons of malathion has been sprayed. Last week’s spraying was washed away hours later by a surprise rainstorm.

Local farmers have been hit with extra expenses because of the infestation. Many have had to pay for ground-based weekly pesticide treatments or packing-plant fumigation.

Within the quarantine zone, lemons and avocados are the dominant crops, followed closely by strawberries and Valencia oranges, agricultural officials said.

While the value of crops in the quarantine zone was not available, the county’s overall lemon crop was worth about $216 million in 1993, while avocados were valued at about $50 million.

Though state and federal authorities do not consider lemons to be host crops for Medflies, the Japanese government does. Japan annually imports about one-third of Ventura County’s prime lemon crop. Its ban on lemons grown in the quarantine zone may leave growers here scrambling to find other international or domestic markets for their crops.

Avocado growers in the quarantine zone have a choice of conducting weekly ground-based sprayings, fumigating thousands of pounds of avocados at a time or forgoing the fresh-fruit market entirely and sending their crop to processing plants to be turned into guacamole.

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Officials at two of the county’s largest avocado packing facilities, Calavo in Santa Paula and Mission Produce near Point Mugu, say the quarantine has forced some growers to fumigate portions of their crops at packinghouses, a practice that was extremely rare before the infestation.

“It’s a service that we have had to offer our growers as a result of the infestation,” said Bob Tobias, operations manager at Mission Produce. “In some cases, growers whose fruit is grown within a mile radius of the initial fly find have no other choice but to fumigate.”

At Calavo, a cooperative owned jointly by growers, packinghouse Manager Lynn Eggleston said about 150,000 pounds of avocados are being fumigated each week. At Mission, a private company, workers are fumigating 50,000 to 60,000 pounds of the fruit weekly.

For John Lamb, a descendant of Ventura County patriarch Adolfo Camarillo, growing avocados and lemons is a time-honored family tradition that has been made more complicated and more costly by the Medfly infestation.

Lamb, who farms about 165 acres of avocados and about 100 acres of lemons on a parcel in the Santa Rosa Valley, said the four-cent-a-pound fumigation cost can quickly add up.

“If I have to fumigate a million pounds, that’s $40,000 out of my pocket,” Lamb said. “That’s money that I could use for other parts of the farm or maybe to pay my taxes.”

Growers are not the only ones with expenses from the sprayings.

The Pleasant Valley School District has spent about $13,000 so far in direct and indirect costs, said Tom Goins, director of maintenance and operations.

On the days that aerial spraying is scheduled, district workers use about 98,000 square feet of plastic sheeting, most of it donated by local farming interests, to cover sand boxes and jungle gym equipment at eight school sites, Goins said.

“Obviously, we don’t want to take any chances,” Goins said. “When it comes to our students, we will do what is necessary to protect their health.”

So far, community reaction to the malathion sprayings in Ventura County has been tame in comparison to the massive demonstrations and protests seen earlier in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties.

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Most residents in the spray zone seem resigned to the aerial spraying. They dutifully cover their cars, recreational vehicles and fish ponds and make sure their children are indoors when the four helicopters--three spraying and one guiding--swoop overhead.

Only the Camarillo-based Group Against Spraying People, or GASP, has consistently protested the operation. It has complained that the government has been reckless in its use of malathion and that too little is known about the health risks of exposure to the chemical.

GASP Chairwoman Terri Gaishin admitted that her 250-member organization has been fighting an uphill battle to get the county and state to stop the spraying.

“The agricultural interests in Ventura County are very strong,” Gaishin said. “I think a lot of people are concerned about the toxicity of malathion but they are afraid to come forward and speak out.”

GASP organized a town hall meeting in early December that was attended by about 300 people. Later that month, it staged a protest outside the offices of Ventura County Health Officer Gary Feldman after he joined other state and federal health officials in declaring malathion safe for use in the fight against the Medfly.

“We have uncovered a lot of research that indicates that even in low doses malathion is toxic and possibly carcinogenic,” Gaishin said, adding that the group doesn’t understand why officials “haven’t decided to err on the side of caution and end the aerial sprayings.”

Gaishin’s group has also sharply criticized the Camarillo City Council and the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, which have steadfastly supported the spraying.

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Scientists continue to debate the dangers of malathion. One Los Angeles-area physician, Dr. Nachman Brautbar, says his research into malathion has led him to believe after 15 years that many questions remain about its health risks.

“We are seeing some clear evidence emerge related to malathion’s toxicity to lab animals,” said Brautbar, a clinical professor at the USC School of Medicine.

Brautbar said people who are exposed to the chemical should document any adverse health symptoms they experience with physicians who are specialists in toxicology.

“If my suspicions are correct about malathion, the sooner people can document its effects, the sooner that evidence can be presented to the state,” Brautbar said. “All I am calling for is objectivity and scientific evaluation.”

Even as the spraying continues, some opponents are touting other ways to combat the Mediterranean fruit fly.

Everett J. Dietrick, founder of Ventura-based Rincon-Vitova Insectaries Inc., believes the answer lies with nature itself.

Dietrick, a 50-year entomologist and pioneer in the use of beneficial insects for agricultural pest control, said a tiny parasitic wasp, introduced in sufficient numbers in the quarantine zone, would attack and destroy the bulk of the wild Medfly population.

“These wasps are like guided missiles,” Dietrick said. “Their use, combined with the use of sterile Medflies, would do the job and eliminate the need for malathion.”

State and federal agriculture officials, however, said that too little is known about the effects of sterile flies and predatory or parasitic beneficial insects used on a wide scale, especially in an agricultural production area like Ventura County.

“There is a concern about the length of time that those techniques take. In the Camarillo situation we needed a tool that would quickly knock down what we viewed as a very serious infestation,” said Mike Chrisman, undersecretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

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“But we haven’t ruled them out,” he said. “We are trying to keep an open mind toward alternatives to malathion, and we are actively supporting research in these areas.”

Chrisman, who coordinates the state’s response to Medfly infestations, said research continues on malathion alternatives, like a Texas experiment examining the effectiveness of a pink dye commonly used to color Pepto-Bismol and lipstick. But, he said, state and federal officials remain certain that, for now, malathion is the best and safest option.

“We believe that there is no evidence that the use of malathion, in the minute amounts we use in the bait, is in any way injurious to the public’s health,” Chrisman said.

He said agricultural officials also learned a great deal about how not to conduct a Medfly eradication program during the debacle that surrounded an aerial spraying operation in December, 1993, in the Corona-Norco area of Riverside County.

A scathing report written by a local task force and submitted to Congress last October by U.S. Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Riverside) chronicled the badly mishandled effort. The report stated that actions by state and federal agricultural officials led to the creation of an atmosphere of chaos, panic and confusion among the public.

Not wanting a repetition of that public relations fiasco, agriculture industry leaders and state officials quickly crafted a “community education” campaign whose goal would be to warn city and county leaders in other areas of the state about the ramifications of a Medfly infestation long before such events took place.

“Some serious mistakes were made in Corona,” Chrisman said. “We cannot deny that, but we can say that we have learned how important it is to try and create a dialogue with people and how important it is to educate the community.”

As a result, the state Agriculture Department earmarked $240,000 in its 1994-95 budget for public relations activities focused on helping municipal and county officials avoid the kinds of problems that came up in Riverside County, a spokeswoman said.

After the Medfly outbreak in the Corona-Norco area, Ventura County became one of the first places the new public relations effort was used, Chrisman said. Similar work is ongoing in Fresno, Kings, Tulare and Merced counties, and in parts of Orange and San Diego counties, he said.

Helping with the public relations campaign was the Ventura County Fruit Fly Action Cooperative Taskforce, an agricultural industry-funded group that began meeting with city and county officials in June, more than two months before the first two flies were found at St. John’s Seminary.

Elisabeth Brokaw, the group’s director, said those early meetings, combined with the fact that the county is a high-producing agricultural area, have led to better acceptance of the aerial spraying program by residents.

“I think people have been inconvenienced by the spraying,” said Brokaw, whose task force has raised about $42,000 in contributions from local and regional farming interests.

“But I also think people love the open space that comes with living in an agricultural region. I think they have accepted that occasionally there will be some inconveniences.”

Chrisman said some of the opposition to spraying has centered on the use of helicopters, which many people find intrusive, but the reasons for the resistance go beyond that.

The helicopters “are a part of the problem,” Chrisman said. “But I think it has more to do with government making a decision that directly touches an individual’s life. These kind of decisions don’t always sit well with people. I understand this.”

Both Chrisman and McPhail, the Ventura County agricultural commissioner, said that after the final spraying in April, entomologists and state inspectors will monitor fly traps in the area for the length of one Medfly life cycle--a period of four to five weeks, depending on the weather.

“Following that, if no additional flies are found, we will lift the quarantine,” McPhail said.

“I’m hesitant to state a specific date,” he said, “but I think we are looking at late May or June if everything works out.”

Medfly Quarantine and Eradication Areas

So far, state and federal agricultural officials have conducted eight aerial sprayings of malathion in the 16-square-mile Medfly eradication zone over eastern Camarillo and Somis. A total of 7,064 gallons of the pesticide and corn syrup bait has been sprayed on the zone. The sprayings are scheduled to continue through mid-April.

Source: State Department of Food and Agriculture