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Hurricane season means prep time for your home and business.

While some residents in barrier island communities are stockpiling necessary items, others have grown tired of rebuilding again.

A battle of the bugs is happening in your backyard.

How Lee County is getting ahead of a potentially busy mosquito season, and the experimental blood test that looks to detect cancer well before a tumor ever forms.

Hello, I'm Sandra Victorova.

Thank you for joining us.

As Floridians begin their preparations for hurricane season, some meteorologists are concerned that cuts to federal agencies means scientists have fewer tools to track bad weather.

We'll talk to a leading meteorologist from the University of Florida about what the cutbacks could mean.

But first, we look at how one barrier island community is still recovering from last year's storms while preparing for the potential impact of another hurricane season.

Mike Walter reports.

Several hurricanes in less than three years reveal the spirit of Pine Islanders.

There's the tough guy.

I'm not really afraid of anything.

You know the woman who worries water is winning the coastal conflict with humans.

People are tired.

I'm tired.

The man whose house flooded two times in two weeks.

I was just frustrated with seeing furniture and stuff being destroyed.

And Pine Islanders learned to follow an old saying in disaster.

Look for the helpers.

But J.P. has gotten really good at responding to natural disasters.

That's the greater Pine Island Alliance formed after him.

Since then, it's dried out and rebuilt homes for 200 families.

And the group still is helping.

Another 102 families make their flooded homes livable for every single one of our survivors.

It's.

It goes beyond just being happy and proud.

It is absolute elation to have someone return to a safe, secure and sanitary environment.

People are raising homes, refusing to surrender the island to the wrath of nature.

They're building bigger and higher on the waterfront.

Others have moved away, leaving many properties for sale.

65 year old Henry Brinkman bought and moved into this mobile home in Saint James City.

That's at the south end of the island.

That was spring 2022.

He says earthquakes and fires drove him out of California.

He admits he knew nothing about hurricanes.

On September 28th of 2022, I'd say, what do you worry about?

Then I get a call from California for my friend.

He said, you need to get out.

And then I said, what are you talking about?

He said, there's some major coming to you.

That something was.

Ian had flooded his home.

He plowed his truck through high water and barely managed to get off island and to a shelter.

Later he dried out and repaired his home.

I'm a very strong person, I can tell you that to to knock me out.

It needs really something serious.

Then last year, Debbie, Helen and Milton brought more flood waters.

Each time Brickman repaired his place, he says he stopped on the Matt Lashay Bridge during one evacuation last fall.

A friend called and urged him to drive off the bridge and come to a concrete block home.

Brinkman drove away and a tornado touched down minutes later, right where he'd been on the bridge.

You might think damage and danger would convince him to move off island.

Not so.

If something happened to you, it's gonna happen no matter what.

So that's how I see the world going around.

At the north end of the island in Mukilteo, Robert and Ellen Ballard are grateful that volunteers, along with FEMA and an insurance company, fixed up their home.

Helen and then Milton flooded the place last fall.

It was a shock.

It was a shock to say this house was built in 1968, and in all these years, it's never flooded.

I don't break down it.

Don't bring me to tears.

It's part of living on the island.

Robert Ballard's family goes back several generations on Pine Island, but he and Ellen agree they will move away if another storm floods the house.

I will never do this again.

It's too expensive.

It's too stressful.

It'll be it.

Yeah.

We won't.

Here.

Somebody will get this house.

Back to work.

Makes the dream work.

Meantime, the alliance gets donated goods to prepare for this hurricane season.

These people say restoring the houses and spirits of their neighbors keeps them here.

This is home.

This is where my son was born.

My father lives down the street from me.

My grandmother lived here.

This is an island community of generational families.

And this is home.

Pine Islanders say their Paradise may not have the panache of Sanibel or the sand of Fort Myers Beach, but it's one of the last places of old Florida and islanders cherish that in spite of hurricanes.

For WGCU news, I'm Mike Walcher.

Some storm experts are expressing concern and not just about the predictions for a busy hurricane season, but scientists are preoccupied about the large cuts to the federal agencies that forecast and respond to hurricanes.

According to the Associated Press, the Trump administration has made large scale staff reductions, travel and training restrictions, and grant cut offs to both FEMA, which prepares for and responds to hurricanes, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which tracks and forecast storms.

Representatives of both Noah and FEMA say the agencies are prepared after public backlash.

The National Weather Service recently announced it is starting the process of hiring more than 100 employees.

To quote, stabilize operations at its field offices around the country.

Joining us now with more on this topic is chief meteorologist Tim Miller, the director of the Florida Public Radio Emergency Network.

Tim, welcome.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here today.

So, Tim, we know obviously we depend on you and your team of meteorologists to guide us through storms here at GCU.

And you serve public media outlets across the state trying to get a sense of whether you are seeing or feeling these federal cutbacks and are you seeing any change in the data you're receiving?

That's a great question.

That's a question really, that's for us, isn't causing us a problem here in the state of Florida.

So we're not with us at all.

The data that we receive, here in the university and for the Florida Public Radio emergency Network is the same information the National Weather Service receives.

So that information that they receive, we also receive and that our meteorologist and of course, interpolate that data, then make a forecast based on the information that we see based on that, on the weather model.

So directly being affected?

No, not at all.

The Associated Press was reporting that as of late March, the weather service's like 120 local field offices had vacancy rates of more than 20%, and that weather balloon launches had been curtailed because of lack of staffing.

Is this a big deal?

Obviously, the Trump administration says there's bloat and waste in the federal government.

Are these cuts a big deal or not?

Yeah, well, they really are a big deal, although we know we may not be seeing it directly here affecting us.

They are seeing it across the country, and the launch of weather balloons is a really big deal.

You would think here in the year 2025, why?

Why don't we launching weather balloons?

Is there some other technology that we can have?

The answer is no.

These weather balloons are extremely important to be launched all across the country.

They give us data of the upper atmosphere.

They give us exactly wind movements, humidity, temperature readings and just basically a snapshot of the atmosphere.

If we lose that ability, we lose the ability to be able to forecast and forecast modeling.

We'll be hampered by this.

There are many areas around the country that already were in dire straits of having a full staffed national Weather Service office, and now any of these cuts to those particular areas just, hampers the situation even further.

Do you see any legitimacy in saying that there are ways that perhaps NOAA could be more efficient?

FEMA as well?

Sure.

I think anything could be anything always more efficient.

So that's for sure.

But the problem with NOAA, the National Weather Service, is the fact that we have been down meteorologists all around the country, for a number of years.

So these cuts, are going to hamper our situation.

Even worse, it doesn't make it doesn't make a bad situation better.

It just makes it actually, you know, worse at a time when we really need the most weather prowess that we can have available, around the country at our fingertips.

So the public remains safe.

That's going to be a really concern, especially as we go to hurricane season.

Tim Miller, we thank you for what you do, and thank you for talking to us today.

Pleasure to be here.

Thank you.

After the break.

Combating cancer at home.

How?

A new device could allow women to be stewards of their own health when facing the threat of cervical cancer.

As the rain returns to southwest Florida, so do those pesky mosquitoes.

Drought conditions created a perfect environment for mosquito eggs, which lay dormant for months until the first rains led to their hatching.

The mosquito season has kicked into high gear weeks.

Jennifer Crawford explains the full on assault.

To combat the insects.

Lee County operates the largest mosquito control district in the entire country.

Like Charlie's taking off under the control ramp could run like a military operation from a former World War Two Army base, Buckingham Field.

The district's $46 million annual budget funding a large aerial fleet of six choppers, four airplanes and three drones.

This is a sterile bag.

You can see our helicopter off our left side of where he is treating this island out here for mosquitoes.

It's round the clock warfare to keep the tiniest enemies from taking over one tenth of our land.

This salt marsh area.

It breathes just a prolific amount of salt marsh does need it.

If left unchecked, their quest for blood meals could threaten tourism, hurt economic development, and spread mosquito borne viruses the 80s and yet died.

And that rides really well.

And this is the environment that we live in.

But it carries things like chicken Gouda, decade.

So we're constantly monitoring it here in Southwest Florida.

Surveillance to keep our people safe.

The battle plan to keep mosquitoes under control.

Often drawn up in the war room at headquarters each week.

This is the service request calls that we've gotten in the last three days.

It's been a busy week.

It's carried out in two phases.

Larva sighting during the day and a delta sighting at night.

That 75% approximately of our operations doing harvest sighting.

So the mosquito goes through egg, larva, pupa.

Adults.

We're catching them in that larval stage.

In fact, that's what our helicopters are doing right now.

And that's because we want to catch them before they become biting adults and possibly biting adults that they carry a virus.

Any larvae missed mature in 5 to 7 days to adults, and they can travel up to 20 miles away.

What I'm saying is, definitely a salt marsh area.

We've got lots of water out there in between.

It's kind of a brush area very close to that mangrove area.

There's houses in development that you receive calls from these areas complaining about mosquitoes.

Yeah.

We have to be seen that people can't live this life to be a bad growth area.

But when you're on the ground, you don't realize that here a mountain near you.

On average, for chopper pilots a day, make between 5 and 12 surveillance checks.

Landing in areas not accessible by truck.

The biologist dips a cup in the water looking for any signs of larvae or black worms called wigglers.

This information helps the team determine where to return to larvicide that day.

We're constantly looking for habitat areas.

We may treat a water area during the day.

We always go back and do a backup check to make sure what we're doing is effective and working.

While most of the effort is spent on larvicide, the rest focuses on attacking the adult biting population.

Adult society is when we have an adult problem, when we catch them at the larval stage with the sheer number.

And that happens at nighttime during peak hours.

McBride says their research shows sunset is the ideal time to adult the site, using fixed wing aircraft to carry out the evening missions.

The airplanes can cover a lot more ground.

We're going a little bit quicker than in the helicopter.

It's also safer.

It's a 200 aircraft.

It's a great job.

I love being able to do it, knowing that we are getting rid of the mosquitoes as much as we can.

With a battleground spanning more than 1200 square miles and divided into five zones, those fighting the war to control 54 species of mosquitoes thriving in Lee County know their mission will continue as long as humans choose to live, work and vacation in one of the most unique mosquito habitats on Earth.

I'm Jennifer Crawford, reporting for WGCU news.

And mosquito control says they want to hear from you.

You can report problems by calling the agency 24 over seven.

They say that feedback helps the agency know about hotspots brewing.

Well, according to the American Cancer Society, cancer killed more than 611,000 people in the US last year, with an estimated 2 million people diagnosed with new cancer cases.

One organization is looking to get ahead of the disease by developing a blood test to detect cancer cells before a tumor even forms.

Weeks Teddy Byrne looks at how the company is hoping to change the future of cancer detection.

The world that we envision is that all of us will do this test once a year, and we either catch cancer at stage one or before, when it is infinitely more curable.

Zar labs CEO Ashish Tripathi is a man on a mission.

His group started working on a cancer drug, but while studying cancer pathways, the team found that they could detect mutations of DNA in stem cells before potentially evolving into a cancerous tumor.

If you detect cancer at stage one, survival rates are 87 to 92%.

After five years.

Stage two it comes down to 65%, stage three it comes down to 35% stage four.

Only 6% of the people will survive five years, right?

So early detection is a very, very big part of, you know, solving cancer.

There are 200 different types of cancer, 3000 subtypes of cancer.

We claim that we can detect all of them.

Aside from early detection, scientists hope the new blood tests could reduce the need for biopsies getting quicker results to doctors.

That information would also show where the cancer is forming and if it has spread to other regions in the body.

What we are claiming is that we can get the biopsy results, or sometimes the drug of mutation is coming from a second tumor.

If I do a biopsy of this one, I don't get those results.

I can technically pull out details of all of them because we have we have progenitors coming from multiple organs in the blood.

Anyone in later stages of cancer performing multiple blood tests could be helpful in combating the disease as a tumor mutates.

Doctors can develop specific treatments without putting the patient through more invasive medical procedures.

If ten people have, lung cancer, the same medicine doesn't work on all ten.

Right.

The challenge, however, is that the physical process of doing a biopsy speeds up the activity of tumor.

So think about it.

Today when we do a biopsy, we get the, pathways readings and on the basis of which we start giving a drug.

But then the oncologist goes blind again because he can't do another.

We continue to give the same medication until one day you come back and say the cancer came back with a vengeance.

It came back with a vengeance because you never changed your strategy.

Tripathy says that by including this test with annual checkups, it could help people stay ahead of cancer by highlighting early warning signs.

Anyone that has been touched with cancer knows that what plays in your mind is were their signatures before?

Could you have could you have acted before?

Right.

And, you know, a year is a long time in with this disease, right?

So anything that can help detect it earlier, I think that's, that's that's, that's a big part of the battle.

And, we believe our, our test will help a lot of people.

For WGCU news, I'm Teddy Byrne.

Cervical cancer used to be one of the most common causes of cancer death for American women.

But since the mid 1970s, that death rate has dropped by more than half due to prevention and screenings, according to the American Cancer Society.

Now, even more lives could be saved after the FDA approved the country's first at home cervical cancer screening tool, essentially an alternative to the pap smear.

To learn more about this medical breakthrough, we are joined now by Doctor Rama McEwen, assistant professor of health outcomes and biomedical informatics at the University of Florida's College of Medicine.

Thank you, doctor McHugh, for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

So wow, so many of us.

I will include myself.

Dread getting the pap smear.

Of course, you've got doctors who have to use that cold metal speculum to, you know, go beyond the vagina and then, you know, get to the cervix and it can be uncomfortable for some even painful.

So how big of a medical breakthrough is this when it comes to women's health now?

This is a big deal.

I have to say that, it is a very exciting time for women especially.

I'm not the only one who does not find the pap smear to be, very exciting procedure.

What this means for women is that they can take their health into their own hands.

And the biggest barrier to getting the pap smear done, as you mentioned, is the uncomfortable uncomfortableness of the test.

So what this new breakthrough means is that women can take that test home.

They can self swab, they can swap the cells themselves in the comfort and privacy of their home, and then they can mail the tests back to the doctor's office.

And then the doctor's office of the lab will then tell them if they have the HPV virus, which is the leading cause of cervical cancer.

So it is a game changer for women.

So, doctor, I know that you believe that this will encourage women to to get tested, right?

But I am wondering.

I was reading on their website, the Teal Wands website, that it's a prescription device for women ages 25 to 65 at average risk.

Do you have any concerns that perhaps people may be at greater risk and don't really realize that they are they're going to go get this exam or that perhaps we're missing out on on having a doctor.

They're performing it.

And visually being able to see, you know, all of a woman's anatomy to make sure that everything's okay.

Yes.

And, unfortunately, in this, in the US, 4000 women die every year of cervical cancer.

And our research shows that the women who are dying from cervical cancer are the ones that don't have access to health care.

They don't have a primary care provider like to said to check them physically.

And so this the the reason why this test is so important is because we are trying to reach those women who don't have access.

So, despite, you know, it's not this again, our health care system is it's very complex and there's a lot of challenges, but just the availability and having this option of going through a company if you're not insured, for example, and if you don't have the time to physically go to a doctor, this test is making it easier for those women who are missing out on screening.

Doctor Mccooey, so appreciate your time.

Thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me.

Coming up.

It has been nearly three years since Hurricane Ian decimated sections of southwest Florida.

Now, a new documentary captures the stories of people that survived the rising surge.

If you experienced Hurricane Ian, it is no surprise it is considered the worst natural disaster in Southwest Florida history.

A new GQ documentary reveals the science behind the destruction, how the age of our residents, the slope of our shoreline, and our construction help make Ian the deadliest and costliest in our region's history.

Rising, Surviving the Surge also examines the persistent threat of storm surge from the coast to the heart of the state, as residents try to rise from the wreckage.

The storms kept coming.

It was crazy.

Years ago, they used to predict that Florida be on the water, you know, or Florida is going to be on the water and you be like, man, you're crazy.

You know what I'm saying?

But now these hurricanes are so big, it's at the bottom of the state, but it's still hitting the top of the state.

It's crazy.

We are joined now by Janine Zeitlin, senior producer and writer of this project, and videographer and editor Tom James.

Welcome to you both.

Thank you.

Thanks.

So, so many fascinating characters in this documentary.

But I loved how you started with a senior in her 60s and her son.

They don't live near the beach, but yet their story was so compelling.

Why did you start with them?

First of all, they're they're great storytellers.

They're very expressive, but they also have a very dramatic story of how they survived the surge once the surge was coming in to their to their home in Naples, which they definitely did not expect.

This home has been in their family for generations.

Yeah.

And there they actually were working with the, Collier County, Community Foundation, and they got a grant to raise their house.

So they're actually getting it, hopefully out of harm's way, raising it up seven feet.

So it was interesting that we were able to get kind of follow them through this process.

Nobody really understood how long this would take.

And and we're finding out it's a very difficult process.

So you kind of see them, go through it all, to, to finally get their house in a position to where they can raise it.

There's no shortage of dramatic, tragic stories, from Hurricane Ian.

How did you decide?

You know, which stories to include, not include.

And what do you hope those stories, you know, convey to our audience?

You know, I think a lot of people changed during Hurricane Ian, and I think it changed, it changed our landscape.

It changed residents.

But and a lot of the stories we wanted to show that change, through through the individual stories and, and, and, our, the people that we featured, they changed in different ways that leads me to my closing question, which is what you hope viewers will finally get out of this documentary.

I think when I watch it, even though, you know, we created it, when you hear all these stories, I think what comes out of it is listen to evacuation orders.

If you are told to leave an area, there is science behind it, there's data behind it and your life could be in danger, which is why authorities are telling you to leave.

Yeah.

And I think it's definitely, all these storms are different, and we've seen that.

And it's it's you can't use the past experiences of storms to judge how you're going to react to this storm.

You need to listen to it.

Orders and evacuation orders and be prepared.

Janine and Tom, thank you so much for your hard work on this project.

Thank you.

And you can watch Rising Surviving the Surge.

Thursday, June 12th at 8 p.m. on WGCU TV or on YouTube.

It's been over a decade since a proposed airport was to deliver a big economic boost to Southwest Florida.

Next week, we look into the issues that have kept the big plans grounded.

Join us for that story and more next week.

And don't forget to like and subscribe to our WGCU News YouTube channel, where you will find all of our stories and extended interviews.

Have a great weekend everyone, and we'll see you again next week.