Yuma County officials are concerned about the Zika virus — and they have reason to be. Yuma has many agricultural workers who come from parts of Mexico and Central America, where the virus is present.
Richard Cuming is a Yuma County Vector Control specialist and his job is to reduce breeding sites for mosquitoes. On a 100-degree June afternoon, Cuming hung a mosquito trap in a cluttered yard in downtown Yuma.
“We’ll go ahead and hang this in a front porch area. It’s going to attract the mosquito, thinking they’re gonna get a bloodmeal," said Cuming.
This is just one of many sites he will check in neighborhoods and recreation areas with bodies of water. One thing he hopes to learn is if the mosquito that can carry the Zika virus is increasing in numbers.
“Before 2012 we didn’t even know we had it here; it’s a tropical mosquito so you wouldn’t think you’d find it out in the desert. Then we had a couple wet summers and then we started finding it here,” Cuming said.
Cuming later returned to his office to examine the mosquitoes he’s caught. He laid out his specimens on white paper under a microscope and spotted what he was looking for: the Aedes aegypti mosquito . It has white scales in a striped pattern.
“And it really pops out when you look through the microscope. You can’t mistake it for anything else," Cuming said.
But Cuming won’t test the mosquito for the virus. In fact, the A. aegypti in Yuma County have never been tested for Zika; the test is not yet widely available and it’s expensive. Cuming said he won’t suspect the mosquitoes of being infected until someone in the area is diagnosed with the virus.
Besides, there’s not much he could do if the test did come back positive.
Michelle Smith is the coordinator for the Yuma County Emergency Preparedness Program. Smith said A. aegypti is one tricky mosquito — especially hard to get rid of because it lives indoors as well as outdoors.
“And you can’t go into somebody’s house with a fogger and blow them out with mosquito insecticide," she said.
Smith said the most important thing the county can do right now is educate the public.
“It’s going to take everybody in the community being really diligent about looking around their homes making sure they don’t have plants and toys things like that that tend to collect water out in the yard,” said Smith.
One place on alert is San Luis — a small border town, 25 miles southwest of Yuma.
San Luis has only one walk-in medical clinic treating many migratory workers who cross through the town in winter to agricultural fields all across the county. Dr. Charlotte Richards is an OBGYN at the clinic.
“I sort of jokingly call it the Amsterdam of the United States because people are in and out, but they eventually come back," said Richards.
Even though there are no reported cases of Zika in San Luis yet, Richards said its arrival is inevitable. The problem is, it’s difficult to diagnose since only one in five individuals with the virus presents symptoms.
Richards is especially concerned about her pregnant patients. Zika is believed to cause microcephaly, a condition in which a baby’s skull and brain are underdeveloped.
Alondra Peralta is 31 weeks pregnant. She works at the clinic's front desk, but she's here today for a check-up. Peralta said she isn’t too worried about Zika now that she takes all the necessary precautions.
“Well, at first I was scared, but I’ve followed the directions of not being outside during the weather when it’s humid, or wearing long pants and long sleeve shirts for the same cause," Peralta said.
There’s also a high teen pregnancy rate in Yuma County. The clinic recently lost a federal grant that gave free contraception for girls as young as 14 — and this worries Richards.
“We’re trying very hard to keep people from getting pregnant here. Once we lost that grant, we got more girls in here than we had before,” Richards said.
There is a lot of concern over available resources to fight Zika. Cuming, who traps mosquitoes with the county vector program, said his budget has seen cuts for the past five years. So county officials will rely, for now, on education.
This winter, Yuma County’s agricultural season, tens of thousands of migrant workers will cross each day to work in U.S. fields. Officials plan to post signs at the San Luis Port of Entry and hand out pamphlets, warning, among other things, that Zika is transferrable through bodily fluids.