Steve Smulders
For a moment I thought I was watching a scene from the satirical program Jiskefet, or to a new episode of Arjan Ederveen's famous series 30 Minutes. But no, it was a serious report from a current affairs program OUR. In this film, insect inspector Kees, dressed in a bright yellow reflective vest and armed with a flashlight and pellet dispenser, hunts for traces of the dreaded tiger mosquito in a backyard. On safari in the Vinex district!
Kees is risking his life as part of the control program that the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) launched this year to combat the spread of the Asian tiger mosquito in the Low Countries. Last year, this intruder was found in no fewer than 37(!) places in the Netherlands. Action must be taken now, before it is too late!
As a resident of Italy, I have to chuckle at Kees' endearing work and the good intentions of the NVWA. I don't think they're shooting the scary mosquito with a cannon, but with a clapper gun. Am I seeing it wrong? Maybe, but while people in the Netherlands are panicking about the Aedes albopictus, as he is famously called, this tease (because he is annoying) has been established in Italy for decades. People have learned to live with it here.
Used to mosquitoes
Especially in Northern Italy, people are used to nuisance from mosquitoes. The extensive rice fields around Milan and Pavia After all, they are ideal breeding grounds for the buzzing people. The fact that rice is grown in the Po Valley is a surprise to many tourists, but given the humid, oppressively warm climate in the steam basin that this plain is, it is not surprising at all.
We discovered this ourselves in 2007 when we rented an apartment in the region for a week, with the intention of finding a place to stay in Pavia where we could stay for six months from September 2007 (you can read how that turned out in my book Italian conditions).
At the time, I couldn't find a place to stay for a week in Pavia itself (a bad omen) so I rented something that was close to it according to the map. San Genesio ed Uniti, that was the pleasant name of the hamlet. Little did I know that this village is located in the middle of the rice fields and undoubtedly has the highest mosquito density in all of Italy.
The mosquitoes, which in my panicked memory were 5 cm large, danced (even during the day) above the hot tiled roof that we looked out on from our terrace. We could tell that it was the tiger mosquito from the unmistakable white spots on the black legs and black bodies.
Apocalypse Now
You could only reach the refreshing swimming pool in the garden of the apartment complex by sprinting while wrapping your bath towel around yourself. Unfortunately, you were only safe from the helicopter-like attacks of the winged brats (drones) in the bath itself before la lettre) if you stayed permanently underwater. Apocalypse Now in the Po Valley! The owner told us with a sigh that he had always wanted a swimming pool and now he could not use it.
During a car ride in the area (rice fields everywhere you looked) we came to a closed railway crossing. We had left the windows open during the ride, but now that we saw the huge clouds of mosquitoes dancing in the light of the headlights at dusk, we didn't know how quickly to close them!
In the apartment that we eventually found in Pavia, we had little trouble with mosquitoes because for the time being the tiger mosquito only flourishes at higher temperatures and therefore not in later autumn, winter and early spring.
Our final home was high in the hills of... Beyond Pavese and the striped stinging devil had not yet penetrated there in 2008. Until sometime in the 10s. Then we noticed that we were suddenly being stung during the day as well.
Infectious diseases
And yes, there it was: the tiger mosquito. From now on, applying DEET during the day was the motto. We also encountered the stinging animal in other parts of Italy, by the sea, in the hills, in the city, everywhere where it was warm and cozy.
An important reason to combat the tiger mosquito is that this mosquito species plays a crucial role in the transmission of nasty infectious diseases such as dengue fever and chikungunya, once they are present in the population. The RIVM calls the chance of becoming ill from a mosquito bite in the Netherlands 'very small'. Yet here too, prevention seems better than cure.
But the tiger mosquito does not seem to be able to be stopped, in any case it has not been successful in Italy and whether the small-scale approach and the rising temperatures in the Netherlands will succeed? I do not think so.
Large-scale control programs
Italian researchers are focusing on large-scale programs that, for example, make female mosquitoes infertile so that reproduction is no longer necessary. People are also looking for rice varieties that thrive without the fields having to be flooded for a while: remove the breeding pond (see for example here). You can of course also use the latter directly at home against all types of mosquitoes: make sure there is no standing water anywhere where they can lay their eggs.
What certainly does not work is the planting of a special variant of the catalpa, the catambra, which is offered for big money here in Italy. I put a few in a pot on our terrace, which was plagued by the white-spotted spike, and thought it had some effect, until... I saw such a bastard sitting casually on the leaf of one of the plants! Wasted money. Una truffa!
For the time being, the Netherlands has to rely on Kees and associates in their yellow vests, who manfully, like Hansje Brinkers with their thumbs in the dike, try to stop, or at least slow down, the oncoming tiger mosquito tsunami. Until a better solution comes along.
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