PITTSFIELD, Mass. – Mosquitos are emerging and the Berkshire County Mosquito Control Project is working to help reduce concerns of the potentially dangerous viruses they carry and spread. 

 “It’s a constant process of checking the water to see what’s there and sampling the mosquito populations to see numbers and possibility of disease,” said Berkshire County Mosquito Control Project Superintendent Chris Horton.

One of the techniques the project does is to check for mosquito larvae in certain areas like wetlands. They then treat the area to essentially eliminate the mosquitoes before they end up in people’s backyards.

“If we find larvae at the same time, we treat that water body or wetland with a biological larvicide, which will is specific to mosquito control larvae. And it will cause them to stop feeding, and they’ll die off before they emerge as flying mosquitos,” said Horton.

They also set up traps to catch mosquitoes and bring them back to classify and test them for West Nile virus or Eastern Equine Encephalitis. Both can cause potentially fatal illness in people. 

“We trap mosquitos, classify them by species and we send them to Mass. Department of Public Health labs in Boston, where they do genetic testing to determine if they’re carrying diseases,” said Horton.

It’s still early to determine how the mosquito season will be this year, but the project is working to lessen the risk.

Spraying is a possibility, depending on the number of mosquitos, if they tested positive for the viruses and permission from local boards of health. 

“In the past, Pittsfield has not gone to adult control until we had some sort of a public health issue,” Horton said,

“Right now, were working toward consensus with city council and board of health on what our conditions, basically what our approved plans are going to be for the 2024 season,” Horton said.

Until then, they will keep working on larval control to try to prevent the mosquito population from growing.