Countywide : Pest-Watchers Gather at Vector Control Lab

Forget the festivities. Herbert E. Little came for the rodents.

A state veterinarian from Ontario, Little and a fellow researcher from UC Davis dropped by Orange County’s new vector control laboratory to collect some frozen specimens of rats and mice.

“I am just amazed,” Little said of the $900,000 facility in Garden Grove, which had an open house Thursday. The new building, with its bright lights and fine microscopes, is a far cry from the 1949 laboratory it replaces, he said.

With its state-of-the-art equipment, “it’s a little unusual” for a county facility, said Hailu Kinde of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

Planned before the county’s 1994 bankruptcy, the lab at Haster Street and Garden Grove Boulevard has ample space for its half a dozen scientists, who conduct research on rodents, insects and other organisms that transmit disease.

There is also room for hundreds of books with such titles as “Beetles of the United States,” samples labeled “Endangered Feces of California” and a few frighteningly lifelike plastic models of rats.

Former Vector Control District board member Barbara Kiley said that building the new lab was both necessary and fiscally responsible.

Previously, the scientists “were packed in the old building like rats,” said Kiley, a Yorba Linda City Council member. “If there were a fire, they would never have survived. Luckily, it was planned before the bankruptcy, and we had the money.”

The Vector Control District’s technicians, who routinely monitor local insects and animals for bubonic plague, the hantavirus and typhus, are now also on the lookout for Africanized honeybees.

The county’s forensic entomologist, Jim Webb, also works from the lab, using insects to solve crimes. On Thursday, he was studying flies found near the body of an unidentified baby found in Anaheim on Jan. 8 to determine when she was left there.

Vector control’s staff expects the facility to be used by students on field trips and scientists collaborating with the agency on research. As in the past, they also welcome Orange County residents interested in identifying insects they come across.

Veterinarians Little and Kinde are working with the district on an outbreak of salmonella in California. Both predicted that work done at the lab eventually will benefit the entire state.

In the meantime, as with any new facility, “We are working on getting the bugs out,” district education coordinator Jim Francisco declared without a trace of irony.