In an interview with Elena Apostolidou and the ERT1 show “Weekend from 6”, Dr Spiros Mourelatos referred to the cities of Greece that are surrounded by large wetland systems and rice fields, with Thessaloniki being the main city, stressing the need to fortify the city from mosquitoes that grow in the surrounding areas. In particular, he stressed how “unfortunately, Thessaloniki has the sad privilege of having an endemic and many cases of West Nile virus compared to other cities and of course it is surrounded, and perhaps it is not by chance, by many wetlands and many rice paddies, so we have to fortify it. That is to say, we have to do exactly the mosquito control actions in such a way that these mosquitoes, especially the flood mosquitoes, do not enter the city.”
Referring to the many wetlands that exist east of Thessaloniki and their high productivity in terms of mosquito larvae that directly affects the city, Mr. Mourelatos pointed out that this year no larger mosquito populations have been recorded, thanks to the large time series of data available to Ecodevelopment, he can compare the current situation with the situation of recent years, resulting in lower levels of nuisance and risk levels. “And the epidemiological risk is rather low compared to what both the European organisations and the World Health Organisation are predicting.”
Finally, Mr. Mourelatos also mentioned the application “Mosquito Vision”, which can be downloaded free of charge by any citizen from the Google Play Store and the App Store, and provides a daily five-day forecast of mosquito nuisance for two and a half thousand villages of four regions of the country. The app has also recently incorporated Citizen Science-type features, through which citizens can report their own feedback on nuisance and potential mosquito breeding sites.
You can watch the full interview with Mr. Murelatos in the following video.