By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: September 5, 2010

Michigan State University, via Associated Press

The emerald ash borer has spread to New York State.

You have perhaps heard about the bugs. In fact, it’s hard to turn on the television or read a newspaper without hearing more about bedbugs. In your mattress, at the office, the theater, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, the Empire State Building — from New York to Portland, it’s the summer’s It bug.

But at the Cornell University Agroforestry Resource Center in the Catskills, they are more concerned with a less celebrated bug, the emerald ash borer. Native to China, it was first detected in the United States in Michigan in 2002 — perhaps arriving in packing material with shipments to auto plants. Since then it has spread across the upper Midwest and into Canada, killing tens of millions of ash trees. It was first reported in New York in June 2009 in Cattaraugus County in southwestern New York.

This June it was discovered in Ulster and Greene Counties in the Catskills, including in the Catskill Forest Preserve. The larvae of the ash borer, a beetle with metallic green wing covers, burrow into tree bark, killing the tree in one to three years. There is no known systemic way to stop its spread or to save infested trees.

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Big write up and audio piece done by NPR - very much worth checking out

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Peter Krask stepped out of his New York City apartment one day last year, shut the door, and walked away forever, leaving behind almost everything he owned.

He carried away only a few items of clothing, personal records, and his computer.

Krask's apartment was infested with bedbugs. Savoring warmth, they swarmed in his DSL port, light fixtures, carpets and furniture. They'd feasted on him nightly for a year — which he spent visiting doctors in an increasing state of panic over the rashes inflaming his buttocks and other body parts before finally ascertaining the cause.

It was Cimex lectularius, the flat, cockroach-colored, lentil-sized pest whose favorite food is not just warm blood but human blood. Bedbugs are back, bigtime. According to a National Pest Management Association study, outbreaks have soared 81 percent nationwide since 2000. Their sudden resurgence in all fifty states of a formerly bedbug-free nation has caught off-guard not just the medical and pest-control industries but millions of ordinary people who now apply costly, time-consuming, potentially toxic and inconclusive strategies for slaughtering insects that inhabit indoor environments both soft and hard and can lie in wait without eating for up to a year. Finding hosts, they feed by night, doubling in size as they suck.

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By Bob LaMendola, Sun Sentinel

A tourist from Miami-Dade County contracted the mosquito-borne disease dengue fever while visiting Key West earlier this month, health officials in Florida said Monday.

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DADE CITY — Health officials have confirmed a case of Eastern equine encephalitis in a local horse, prompting reminders to east Pasco residents to protect themselves against mosquito-borne diseases.

The disease was found in a Dade City horse that had been euthanized, said Deanna Krautner, spokeswoman for the Pasco County Health Department.

"Although cases of (Eastern equine encephalitis) are rare in humans, if a person gets sick with the disease it is often serious and can even be fatal," said county health officer Dr. David Johnson.

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