US
beekeepers fear for livelihoods as anti-Zika toxin kills 2.5m bees
‘It
kills everything’: conservationist warns over threat to other
animals
Regulators:
‘clear and public health crisis’ allows use of Naled chemical
Alan Yuhas in San
Francisco
@alanyuhas
Sunday 4 September
2016 11.55 BST
Huddled around their
hives, beekeepers around the south-eastern US fear a new threat to
their livelihood: a fine mist beaded with neurotoxin, sprayed from
the sky by officials at war with mosquitos that carry the Zika virus.
Earlier this week,
South Carolina beekeepers found millions of dead honey bees carpeting
their apiaries, killed by an insecticide. Video posted by a beekeeper
to Facebook showed thousands of dead insects heaped around hives,
while a few survivors struggled to move the bodies of fellow bees.
“This is what’s
left of Flowertown Bees,” a despondent keeper says in the video.
Company co-owner Juanita Stanley told the Associated Press her farm
looked “like it’s been nuked” and estimated 2.5 million bees
were killed.
“This is what’s
left of Flowertown Bees”, where up to 2.5 million bees were killed
by an aerial spray meant to combat the Zika virus. Video: So many
bees dead after the aerial spray.
In another Facebook
post, South Carolina hobbyist Andrew Macke wrote that he had lost
“thousands upon thousands of bees” and that the spraying had
devastated his business. “Have we lost our mind,” he wrote,
“spraying poison from the sky?”
Around the US, bees
and other pollinators contribute an estimated $29bn to farm income.
Clemson University’s department of pesticide regulation is
investigating the incident.
The program head, Dr
Mike Weyman, said that though South Carolina has strict rules about
protecting pollinators, county officials were using the neurotoxin,
Naled, under a clause exempting them in a “clear and public health
crisis”.
More than three
dozen people have tested positive for Zika in South Carolina, Weyman
said, and officials have made it a priority to prevent local
transmissions through the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
“We don’t want
one of those mosquitos having a blood meal on an individual we’ve
already determined was positive,” Weyman said. “We know beyond a
shadow of a doubt that [Zika] is up and running in Florida. If it
gets in the mosquito population ... you’re playing catch-up.”
South Carolina’s
protocol for Zika infections is to alert local officials of a
carrier’s residence, which they “consider a ground zero”,
Weyman said. Local authorities then target the local mosquitos in a
200-yard radius, in this case with spray.
Flowertown Bees was
listed on local records but not in the state’s voluntary registry
of pollinators, according to Weyman. “We know where the big ones
are,” he said, “but as you can see this was a fairly large
operation and almost right smack dab in the spray path.”
If regulation
allowed some spraying that would kill half of your livestock
overnight, how would you recover?
Jennifer Holmes,
Florida State Beekeepers Association
Despite the
investigation into what went wrong, the killing has beekeepers
worried about what might happen next.
“Everyone that
I’ve spoken to has major concerns about the effect” of
insecticides, said Jennifer Holmes, vice-president of the Florida
State Beekeepers Association and the co-owner of a company with about
300 colonies north of West Palm Beach.
Comparing bees to
cows or other pillars of agriculture, she said: “If there was a
regulation that allowed some spraying that would kill half of your
livestock overnight, how would recover your livelihood?”
Holmes has spent the
last week working with beekeepers and state and county officials. The
keepers, she said, fear “not just the immediate die-offs, but
possible genetic die-offs or sterility” for bees that survive the
first sprays.
“We understand the
serious threat of possible disease,” she said, “but we also have
to maintain our agricultural livelihood.”
A Louisiana
beekeeper, who requested anonymity because of work with county
officials, added another set of concerns: careless mixture and
application of chemicals, mismanagement and long-term imbalance in
the ecosystem.
“In order to ‘fix’
the problem,” the keeper said, “it will all have to begin with
re-establishing healthy soil that will nourish a healthy plant
population that will nourish healthy populations, whether it be the
honeybee or a deer.
“Chemical
application of any sort creates an imbalance from the ground up, even
if a simple mosquito is the target.”
‘We always have
the environment in mind’
Experts at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) and independent universities say Naled is far
safer than other chemicals. It breaks down rapidly and, in the very
low doses at which it is prescribed, should not pose a risk to
humans.
“In Louisiana, we
use these products quite frequently to reduce mosquitos, but we don’t
see many nontarget effects, because the doses are really small,”
said Dr Kirsten Healy, a public health entomologist at Louisiana
State University.
“A lot of people
don’t realize that we always have the environment in mind. We try
to have products that have the lowest possible impact.”
Even the mosquitos
targeted “quickly bounce back”, she said. Healy recommended a
multi-pronged approach: aerial and ground sprays along with removal
of the trash cans, bird feeders and other containers where water
pools and mosquitos breed.
Aerial sprays
threaten other pollinators. Dennis Olle, director of conservation
programs for the North American Butterfly Association, noted the
effect of chaotic ocean winds near his office in Miami. “It’s
aerial bombing without any sense of being able to lay the chemical
down on the target,” he said.
It kills everything.
There’s no question it is highly, highly deleterious to butterflies
and other arthropods
Dennis Olle, North
American Butterfly Association
Olle conceded that
that he was not a scientist – he is an attorney – but described a
2015 Florida International University study that found Naled
application was uneven and harmful to butterflies.
“It kills
everything,” he said. “There’s no question that it is highly,
highly deleterious to butterflies and other arthropods, even mammals
in high enough doses.”
He agreed that
door-to-door removal of breeding objects and hand spraying were
effective techniques against mosquitos, but worried about repeated
low doses of chemicals to both pollinators and his children.
“If they’re
killing every mosquito, as they claim, everything else needs to be
worried too,” he said. “That’s not rocket science, that’s
common sense.”
Olle’s fears have
sympathizers in Florida and Puerto Rico, where there have been,
respectively, 35 and 13,791 mosquito infections of the Zika virus.
Earlier this summer on Puerto Rico, doctors rallied against Naled
when the CDC made a last-ditch plea to start spraying. Governor
Alejandro García Padilla rejected the proposal in July, citing
concerns over possible side effects on humans and other animals.
Puerto Rico was also
the site of some of what limited Naled-mosquito research has been
performed in the last 30 years. Dr Duane Gubler, a professor at Duke
Medical School and an expert in infectious diseases, led that
research and found that Naled had mixed results.
“It’s
unpredictable,” Gubler said. “We did the whole city of San Juan
and it appeared to be somewhat effective in some areas but not
others.”
Aedes aegypti
mosquitos, Gubler said, were especially difficult targets since they
breed inside and under houses, in buckets, tires, puddles or any
container with stagnant water.
“There’s some
data from Florida that suggests it can be effective where Aedes
aegypti mosquitos are primarily outdoor breeders,” he said, “but
from my data, it was spotty.”
Like Healy, Gubler
recommended a mix of techniques – targeting adults and larvae
through habitats and sprays and a partnership between citizens and
agencies. “It’s near impossible for any government agency to
control all of the mosquitos,” he said.
“It’s a matter
of weighing the benefits versus the risks,” he added, noting the
critical place of bees, especially, in keeping crops growing.
“If you have to
make a decision on whether it protects, say, your pregnant wife from
being exposed versus killing a few butterflies, I suspect in most
people’s minds it’s probably worth the risk.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário