(MintPress) — Over the course of the spring and summer, Dallas, Texas has become a microcosm of the United States’ enduring mosquito dilemma. Aside from the unprecedented quantity of mosquitoes buzzing around the Dallas/Fort Worth area, the instances of humans contracting the West Nile virus has reached alarming levels. With the growing threat of West Nile in Dallas and other areas across the country, cities and municipalities struggle to find a way to curb mosquito populations, often resorting to spraying pesticide, which has already come with claims of making people ill.

The Center of Disease Control (CDC) says this year’s crop of mosquitoes have created the highest number of West Nile infections since the disease was detected in 1999. The most recent figures from the CDC indicate 1,118 cases of the West Nile disease across the country, with 28 of those resulting in deaths. What’s more worrisome is the high concentration of mosquitoes in certain communities: Around 75 percent of the cases have been reported in Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas. Minnesota and California have also struggled with West Nile cases.

The CDC says the unusually warm winter and early spring allowed mosquitoes to lay eggs sooner, allowing mosquitoes to come in contact with the disease at an earlier time in the season. Experts say West Nile is becoming a more common seasonal epidemic that can manifest itself in flu-like symptoms in humans and can potentially become lethal if left untreated.

Air raid

If the areas affected by the growing endemic are any indication of whether the U.S. is ready to handle a more widespread West Nile outbreak, there could be cause for concern. In light of the growing concern of West Nile cases in the Dallas area, city officials scrambled in early August to find ways to reduce the risks. Since the disease was found in New York in 1999, not much has been accomplished in terms of developing a vaccination against the virus or implementing preventative medicine against it.

In high-risk areas across the country – namely California and Florida – pesticide is commonly sprayed near swamps or low-levels of water where mosquito eggs can hatch and thrive. The City of Dallas saw that measure as a quick-fix tactic to reduce risk when it called for 5,000 gallons of the pesticides to be sprayed like a fog over the city. That’s when the debates began.

Other cities in North Texas were encouraged to spray against the mosquitoes as well, but the various chemicals in the pesticides raised concern over whether the sprays would be more detrimental to the residents’ health than the mosquitoes. Many cities and townships opted into spraying, while other remained skeptical and opted out.

The debate came to a head at a Dallas City Council meeting to discuss the pesticide. Bob Townsend, mayor of the nearby city of Richardson, opted in to the measure, saying all indicators pointed to the spraying as a legitimate and necessary treatment to reduce the risk of West Nile.

“The evidence is very compelling that it is time to expand on mosquito control efforts in our region,” Townsend said. “Health leaders from government agencies at the federal, state and local level, and third party medical groups all support expanded action to limit the risks to people from contracting this potentially deadly disease.”

But other public officials said it was a wasteful and extreme measure. Dallas City Council member Scott Griggs said the city never even attempted to better educate its residents on how to avoid West Nile and mosquitoes alike. He said the pesticides were unproven on such a widespread scale and that there could be health effects in the young, elderly and those with already compromised immune systems.

“This spraying is absolutely a measure of last resort. I have questions about its efficacy,” Griggs told the Council. “I have concerns about how it’s going to damage various ecosystems. And one option that’s on the table that hasn’t been fully picked up is education.”

Those concerns have already come to fruition, as complaints of non-mosquito related illnesses have sprung up in the Dallas area. On her farm near Dallas, Marie Tedei said she could smell the residual pesticide after her farm received a heavy dose of the fog which triggered burning in her throat and lungs, making it difficult to breathe.

Jenny Land, a health activist in the area, said she is compiling reports of the pesticide’s health effects and has received multiple instances of people suffering through a wide array of symptoms.

“There’s lots of reports of people vomiting usually in combination with some other symptoms, there are people who are reporting persistent headaches and allergic reactions,” Land told a Dallas CBS affiliate.

Ready for an epidemic, pandemic?

Despite the knee-jerk reactions to the West Nile outbreak in Dallas and the surrounding areas, the moral of the story could be interpreted as the lack of overall preparedness in the U.S. in the instance of a pandemic. Potential cuts to medical research and continued unpreparedness in the face of evolving influenza strains show that priorities lie elsewhere.

The CDC has recently warned against a new strain of swine flu in humans that shows no sign of slowing down prior to this winter’s traditional flu season. The rise of the new strain comes three years after the H1N1 strain of influenza was classified as a pandemic in the U.S. In that case of influenza, conservatives scoffed at the widespread need of vaccinations, saying it was “big government” attempting to control citizens. That attitude could potentially carry over to this year’s new discovery, as scientists say they may not have a vaccination ready on the scale needed to meet demand.

In a contribution to CNN, associate director for the Law and Public Affairs program at Princeton University Leslie Gerwin wrote that the U.S. should have learned a lesson from its slow response to the H1N1 virus of three years ago, but that the same ideologies from conservatives will slow scientific research that is dedicated to treating and eradicating disease.

“H1N1 was not a false alarm, nor were the government recommendations to address it hyperbolic,” Gerwin wrote. “In the uncertainty of a crisis environment, government officials provided effective leadership. The distortions of politicians, ideologues and certain media outlets did us a disservice.”

The medical research community has not been immune to potential budget cuts, as it has called for Congress to avert a 7.8 percent funding reduction to medical research – an agreement reached during last year’s debt ceiling debate. The reductions, if carried out, would result in job losses for tens of thousands of medical researchers, according to health advocacy group United for Medical Research (UMR).

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of the research groups that would be affected. The government research agency is one of the foremost medical research facilities in the world and one of the primary agencies of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The department could lose 33,000 jobs and $4.5 billion in funding in the cuts.

The research done at the NIH goes to a myriad of causes, says Susanna McColley, a director at the Cystic Fibrosis Center at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. McColley said the NIH plays a role in pioneering cystic fibrosis research while benefiting the general public with it research in infectious disease.

“The importance of NIH research funding is that it goes to answer the root causes of disease,” McColley told Columbia News Service. “There has already been poor growth in NIH funding. I think we owe it to the people of the U.S. to be leaders in medical science.”