The Columbia Spectator, Sept. 26, 2024

Community activists challenge New York City’s pesticide spraying for West Nile virus amid health concerns

The city began spraying the chemicals in specific neighborhoods in late summer 2024 following reported increases in virus cases.

By Naomi Baker

Nearly two months before the New York City Department of Health began spraying pesticides in Upper Manhattan to combat West Nile virus, the Community Board 9 health and environment committee passed a resolution demanding that the health department halt the spraying of pesticides.

Pesticides have long been employed by the city to prevent the spread of West Nile virus, a potentially dangerous disease primarily carried by mosquitoes. The city began spraying the chemicals in specific neighborhoods late this summer following reported increases in virus cases.

Despite the reported benefits of spraying for West Nile virus, some community advocates are calling for the spraying to stop, claiming that the practice has harmful effects on both public health and the environment.

“It’s causing way more illnesses than it could ever prevent, even if it could prevent, which it doesn’t,” Mitchel Cohen said. Cohen is a longtime anti-pesticide activist and co-founder of the No Spray Coalition, a New York City-based grassroots organization.

According to the health department website, no diseases in humans or pets linked to pesticides sprayed to mitigate West Nile virus have been reported since 1999.

Every summer, the health department applies pesticide spray to mosquito populations to limit the spread of the West Nile virus. The health department began the practice after a large-scale outbreak of the virus in 1999, during which 59 patients were hospitalized with the disease. Populations of mosquitoes are examined before spraying to determine whether or not they show significant levels of West Nile virus.

“As long as you don’t have evidence of active infection of these mosquitoes … there’s no risk. It doesn’t make sense to spray something that can be toxic, so it requires information,” Ian Liptkin, professor of microbiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, said.

While West Nile virus has limited effects for most patients, in more serious cases the disease can cause brain and spinal cord inflammation and can even lead to death. Lipkin, who has been internationally recognized for his work with West Nile virus, has been involved in research around the disease since 1999. He was the first to use purely molecular methods in order to identify infectious agents and recognized the link between the virus and encephalitis—which causes inflammation in the brain— in North America.

“Maybe 1 percent [of those infected] will progress to have serious disease, and that’s obviously encephalitis that can be life threatening. There is no treatment for West Nile encephalitis,” Liptkin said.

However, for Cohen, the danger of the chemicals used in the pesticide spray outweighs the possible benefits.

“West Nile itself is not a potent thing. It does affect a few people,” Cohen said. “For the couple of people who got it, it could have been significant, so I’m not diminishing that, but you don’t deal with problems by poisoning the entire ecosystem.”

“When used correctly, pesticides pose no significant health risks to people or their pets,” the health department website reads.

The No Spray Coalition has been engaged in legal procedures fighting against the city’s use of pesticide spray for several years.

Tiffany Khan, a member of CB9, wrote the board’s resolution. Khan said she decided to write the resolution after learning about the issue from health and environment committee chair LaQuita Henry.

“I started looking into it and asking questions. They raised my concerns and sent them to the Department of Health. DOH sent me this ridiculous response, and then I just kind of put it, you know, on the back burner,” Khan said. “So when June comes around, I’m like, ‘Oh my god, we’re about to go into summer recess. I have to say something officially.’ So that’s when I wrote the [resolution].”

Khan believes that the presence of West Nile virus does not justify the city’s use of potentially harmful pesticides.

“There really is no emergency. West Nile virus was first detected in New York in 1999 and it was a grand spanking total of five people who passed away from it. When I say New York, I’m talking about not just the five boroughs, but the metropolitan area. So that’s about 20 million people. Do the math, all right, we have more kids in the South Bronx that die of asthma than of West Nile virus at its height,” Khan said.

While the spraying of the pesticides is legally permitted, according to Cohen, it is not allowed to be conducted over water, which he said sparked his organization’s lawsuit to fight against the spray.

“That was the one avenue in which we were allowed to file our lawsuit, even though we had people on the witness stand saying, ‘I was sprayed in the face,’ and ‘I have developed this cancer from it,’ … and several testifying on the stand before this court case that we brought in federal court, which we eventually won six years later,” Cohen said. “It’s just obscene, as the city continues this policy that started off under Giuliani, continued under Bloomberg, continued under de Blasio, and now is continuing under the current mayor.”

Following the CB9 resolution, Khan said she is disappointed in the lack of response from the health department.

“I was hoping that, very naively, hoping that the city would pause or maybe respond to it. But silly me, if they’re ignoring a federal judge, why would they pay attention to Community Board 9?” Khan said. “By August, I got a notification from someone in my building about this, that they were spraying within a few hours, there was no warning, no notice to the public, and if there was, they sure as hell didn’t make much of an effort to inform people.”

Despite the lack of response, Khan said she hopes that the resolution will inspire further change and activism in the community, opening up more chances for local organizations to work with the government.

“We need to have more coalitions formed among different groups, local community groups working in concert with government to get the city to act in the best interest of the public,” Khan said.

Staff Writer Naomi Baker can be contacted at naomi.baker@columbiaspectator.com.

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Photo By Stella Ragas / Senior Staff Photographer