Mosquitoes and pesticides will make Utah’s homeless campus hell on earth

The site of a future homeless services campus at 2520 N. 2200 West in Salt Lake City is pictured on Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)

The state of Utah’s chosen site for a massive new homeless campus is generously sprinkled with wetlands that environmentalists desperately want preserved, and as such is also a haven for mosquitoes. Despite ample warnings against it, the Utah State Prison was relocated to a similar site not far away. As predicted, prisoners and staff are besieged by mosquitoes and swarms of other biting insects that provide food for the 12 million migrating birds that feed near the Great Salt Lake.  Forcing the homeless into that same environment just exploits them even more.

As the climate warms and mosquito season lengthens, the homeless, like the prison population, will find life in a mosquito factory about as pleasant as a root canal that never ends. But that inevitably launches the “solution” of insecticide warfare, under the assumption that if enough toxic chemicals are sprayed, and evolutionary science and collateral damage conveniently ignored, the mosquitoes will surrender and the biting will stop.

Pesticides (insecticides and herbicides) are poisons to much of the biologic world, from pest insects to humans and everything in between.  Thousands of studies have connected pesticides to multiple poor human health outcomes. One of the most well established is neurotoxicity, hardly a surprise given their origin as nerve agent chemical weapons.  Many pesticides are directly toxic to neurons, especially those that produce the neurotransmitter, dopamine. Pesticides and air pollution are established risk factors for intellectual disabilities, neurodevelopmental disorders, autism, cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease. Given high rates of mental illnesses and disabilities, unhealthy behavior, poor nutrition, and lack of medical care in the chronically homeless, they would only be further victimized if subjected to a continuous barrage of insecticides for months at time, year after year. 

Pesticides also cause metabolic disorders like type II diabetes, reproductive and developmental toxicity, and respiratory disease. They can cause genetic damage, increasing the risk of  multiple cancers, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, multiple myeloma, soft tissue and lung sarcoma, brain, pancreatic, prostate, stomach, liver, kidney, bladder, and gall bladder cancer, including the transgenerational increased risk of cancer in unexposed children of occupationally exposed parents. 

This homeless campus would also be close to where invasive phragmites are sprayed regularly with herbicides, usually glyphosate (i.e. Roundup), the most commonly used herbicide worldwide.  Glyphosate, like many other pesticides, is an endocrine disruptor, meaning it can trigger a wide variety of maladies (birth defects, hormone and reproductive disorders, multiple cancers, fatty liver disease, and impaired brain development, pregnancy complications, miscarriages and pre-term births) by antagonizing or augmenting human hormones even at extremely low doses. Like insecticides, glyphosate is highly toxic to the brain and associated with virtually all the same clinical outcomes as previously mentioned with insecticides. 

Even more alarming, in animal studies glyphosate was associated with multi-system toxicity and pathologies that were more extensive and more severe in up to three subsequent, unexposed generations.

Glyphosate is already toxic enough, but based on EPA’s analysis of new formulations of Roundup sold for residential use, Friends of the Earth found that four new ingredients intended to replace glyphosate, are, on average 45 times more toxic than glyphosate. 

But it gets worse. The most dangerous feature of pesticides is that nearly 70% of all pesticides introduced for commercial sale between 2015 to 2020 have PFAS, i.e. “forever chemicals” in their formulas either intentionally or unintentionally. PFAS are considered the most toxic industrial chemicals ever produced, even worse than the pesticides themselves.

Spraying insecticides has become an institutionalized ritual, rationalized as necessary to prevent human cases of West Nile Virus despite it being ineffective or even counterproductive.  Nearly 80% of infections are asymptomatic and never reported. Normally less than 1% of people infected will develop encephalitis or meningitis, and about .05% of cases will be fatal. But the risks are much higher for elderly males and the immunosuppressed which are overly represented in homeless populations. 

Insecticides inhibit a critical enzyme in white blood cells, impair the survival of those cells, damage the immune system and increase the risk of a debilitating or fatal outcome. Human disturbance of an area, including pesticide spraying, can not only increase the number of mosquitoes, it increases the number of disease-carrying insects. Repeated use of insecticides invariably induces resistance in mosquitoes, launching a chemical arms race invoking ever more spraying and more toxic chemicals. 

The mosquitoes will eventually win this battle and the homeless will lose. For people already living on the edge of survival, rounding them up and smothering them with mosquitoes and pesticides will truly make it hell on earth.