Mosquito Control
After people realized that Yellow Fever was spread by mosquitoes in 1901, the practices of sanitizing cities largely decreased in prevalence. Instead of these measures the government focused on how they could eliminate the mosquitoes that carried the disease. While Florida did start researching mosquitoes soon after they found out about the vector of Yellow Fever, the first state to wage an active war against the mosquitoes was New Jersey. In 1905, Hiram Byrd published a forty-seven page description of all the known mosquito types in Florida. While the government worked on controlling the mosquito population, it is unfortunate that even up into the 1950s that there was still a mosquito problem. In a letter from D.D. White to Leroy Collins, White was basically pleading for Collins to increase mosquito control in Dade County. According to White, Dade County needed mosquito control because it was hurting the tourist trade along with preventing people from moving to Florida. White said that the mosquitoes were so bad that he had to spray DDT with his lawn mower and dust DDT on his shrubbery around the house whenever he was expecting company. Unfortunately the DDT only curbed the mosquito problem instead of curing it. He did acknowledge that there was already money in the budget for mosquito control; however it was not reaching Dade County at that time.
