neighborhood enhancement division<\/a> has been on its toes fighting the dengue virus, as Hillsborough County becomes a hotbed.<\/p>\nAny standing water could become a home to mosquitoes carrying the fever-causing illness.<\/p>\n
Tampa Tires and Wheels does its part, dumping any rainwater weekly.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsually it\u2019s like twice a week (dumping water). Something like that, it depends. Sometimes it rains a lot more. Sometimes it doesn\u2019t rain at all. So you don\u2019t have to do it. So it\u2019s just play it by ear a little bit,\u201d said Khalid Abou-El-Ela with Tampa Tires and Wheels.<\/p>\n
With 30 code officers, Tampa\u2019s neighborhood team leader BillieJo Slatton said the fight against dengue is her team\u2019s top priority.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe ride through the city, we\u2019re going through alleys, we\u2019re going through businesses, residential properties, anything that\u2019s really obvious. So we see water may accumulate, we actually want to educate the citizen. The goal is to empty the water out; that\u2019s the primary goal,\u201d added Slatton.<\/p>\n
On Monday, her team found one culprit in a vacant home.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile we\u2019re out in the field today, our enhancement crew leader, he actually observed the bucket that was full of water. It\u2019s been set near someone\u2019s property, but it\u2019s accessible for us to actually empty the water out of the bucket,\u201d shared Slatton.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the smallest of places that could manifest into the biggest headache.<\/p>\n
\u201cBuckets like this, maybe some kids\u2019 toys, frisbees, anything that could accumulate water,\u201d Slatton said. \u201cYou want to get those things like that and keep them inside or under something so it doesn\u2019t accumulate water and keep it empty.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you may have a bird feeder, bird bath that you want to help the species, but you still want to be able to dump out the water so it doesn\u2019t sit, because we don\u2019t want anything that\u2019s going to harbor or be able to breed mosquito larvae.\u201d<\/p>\n
Officials recommend dumping out water once a week and cleaning out any containers or bowls before filling them back up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 The fight against the bite continues. Tampa\u2019s code enforcement teams are out in full force,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399900,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[3948,571,6075,276,115438,115,135,137,136,835],"class_list":["post-399899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-app-health","tag-health","tag-health-and-medicine","tag-hillsborough-county","tag-justina-rhines","tag-news","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}