TEHRAN — It is boiling hot, you are desperate to get to the bus or subway station trying to evade the scorching sunlight while you should be maddeningly careful not to swallow or inhale the whiteflies flying in almost every direction around you.

Unfortunately with the warm weather setting in the capital, silverleaf whiteflies - these little annoying pests –which are spotted almost everywhere from tree leaves, windshields, and women’s scarves, to your lock of hair, have become the unwanted guests of the Tehraners for some years now.  

Despite the measures taken by Tehran’s Municipality and the City Council, swarm of whiteflies keep attacking Tehran every year over summer making it irritating to walk along the street while you keep sneezing or get a runny nose as one or some of them make their ways through your nose or mouth.

“The whiteflies find the environment pretty appealing now as their natural enemies which used to be highly effective as biological controls disappeared due to the use of pesticides in the city years ago,” the chief of Tehran’s Department of Environment said, ISNA news agency reported.

The absence of their natural enemies that could keep the population under control, warm weather, and the availability of suitable host-plants in Tehran has soared these pests’ population, Mohammad-Hossein Bazgir explained.

According the Health Ministry and the Universities of Medical Sciences, the whiteflies do not cause any serious problems to human health, however they could cause some level of discomfort as they might trigger allergic reactions, Bazgir added.

“Tehran’s Municipality is responsible for controlling such pests’ population and they have taken some measures so far which do not appear to be effective,” the environment official suggested.

He went on to say that washing up host-plants, altering pruning techniques and collecting and burning up tree leaves have worked to some extent but they did not solve the problem thoroughly.

Biological control tends to be the only long-term, sustainable, and optimal solution to get rid of the whiteflies, Bazgir stated, adding, transplanting species of parasitoids, provided that they could successfully adapt to the climate of Tehran, would hopefully resolve the issue. 

Studies confirming the usefulness of the parasitoid wasp have been already conducted in the Iranian Research Institute of Plant Protection affiliated with the Ministry of Agriculture and it is vital to apply the results of the studies in to practice in no time, he highlighted.

The measures proposed by the Tehran Department of Environment is yet to be tested but so far nothing seemed to shrink the whiteflies dense population and citizens should merely wait for the weather to turn cold and naturally wipe them off the face of the city.

MQ/MG