Skeeters are as Southern as RC Cola and Moon Pies but does the capital of the New South deserve top billing for the bloodsuckers?
Orkin put out a press release Monday that said its headquarters in Atlanta is well-suited. The city is not only rated high (bad) for traffic, pollen and rats, but it is No. 1 in the nation for the mosquito.
The veteran bug swatter also rated Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Raleigh and Charlotte and Nashville and Washington D.C. in the top 10.
For folks who live here — or in those cities — that may be no surprise. However, an Orkin competitor, Memphis-based Terminix, contends that by a social-media measurement Orkin’s top 10 aren’t even in the top 10.
According to Twitter-based complaints, No. 1 would go to Goodland, Kan., population, 4, 500. No. 2 goes to Safford, Ariz., No. 3 to Bowling Green, Ohio, No. 4 to Petoskey Mich., and No. 5 is Glenwood Springs, Colo., Terminix said.
The only Southern cities on the Terminix list are Myrtle Beach, S.C., at No. 6, Paragould Ark., at No. 9 and London, Ky., at No. 10 — if you consider Kentucky southern.
It could be that Mid-westerners and Westerners, despite their laconic reputations, complain a lot or at least the ones in small towns have a lot of Twitter time on their hands.
Terminix said it searched about 200 billion tweets posted in 2014 to determine which United States city or town is most pestered by mosquitoes. Southerners may not see any point in whining about skeeters more than the heat.
Southerners apparently just get down to business. Orkin figured its list based on number of mosquito customers serviced in 2014.
Competition for the mosquito capital aside, mosquitoes can be more than an annoyance. They transmit West Nile virus that cause encephalitis (a swelling of the brain) as well as the newer chikungunya virus, which the Centers for Disease Control upgraded to a “nationally notifiable condition,” this year, Orkin said.
Like with heart worms in dogs, mosquitoes transmit the chikungunya virus by sucking the blood of an infected person — usually someone who has traveled to the Caribbean or another affected area — and then transmitting the virus from that person to other people the bugs feast upon.
Symptoms of chikungunya (pronounced chik-en-gun-ye) include fever, headaches and muscle pain, joint swelling and a rash.
The good news, according to the CDC, is that it usually doesn’t kill you.
The bad news is it can hurt like hell and be disabling.
“So far this year, the more than 70 reported American cases of chikungunya virus occurred in travelers returning from the Caribbean and other affected areas outside the U.S.,” Orkin said. ” In 2014 more than 2,400 cases were reported in travelers and nearly a dozen locally-transmitted cases were reported in Florida.”
And, as Orkin was quick to report, the two mosquito species that spread the chikungunya virus – Asian tiger and yellow fever mosquitoes — are common in the Southeast and parts of the Southwest, which dominate Orkin’s list.
And they feed throughout the day, not just at dusk and dawn.
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