Mild Summer?
The Midwest won't necessarily get a respite from the rain. Scattered storms are predicted for each of the next several days in southern Illinois and the St. Louis region of Missouri.
(Related story: Colliding Air Masses Cause More Rain on Flooded Iowa" [June 16, 2008])
But the National Weather Service (NWS) predicts temperatures will be at or below normal through July in most of the flood-affected locales.
Jim Hladik, a NWS meteorologist based in Davenport, Iowa, said cool air masses have been pushing south from Canada and the Great Lakes, a pattern that is expected to continue.
"The general trend is probably near-normal to slightly below-normal [temperatures]" he said.
That may be good news for people worried about West Nile infections, which climbed in 2005 and 2006—both hot years—but dropped during last year's milder conditions.
New Breeding Grounds
Yates, the Missouri health department official, says she knows flood victims have much on their minds. But she hopes residents and cities in flood-affected areas will prepare for next month's West Nile mosquito season.
"The flooding that we're seeing now—it's not just agricultural areas or conservation areas," she said. "It's homes and businesses and communities. That brings in a whole other level of the creation of potential habitat."
Old appliances, for example, can become mosquito breeding grounds when they're left with standing water, she said.
Floodwaters also likely scoured out low-lying areas with little or no drainage, providing places for disease-carrying mosquitoes to breed.
Public health experts say they are hopeful that local governments will identify risky areas and spray low-impact larvicides as a first line of defense.
On the other hand, there's a chance the danger is no greater this year than in previous years.
Lyle Petersen directs the division of vector-borne Infectious Diseases for the Centers for the CDC branch in Fort Collins, Colorado.
He said increased risk of West Nile as a result of the flooding is going to be "minimal, if any," based on what's happened with disease-carrying mosquitoes in the wakes of past floods.
"Then again, we haven't had a flooding event like this since we've had West Nile" in the United States, he said.
The disease first appeared here in 1999.
|
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
|
