"Anytime you take, say, a glove off, you'll get swarmed by thousands of mosquitoes," he said.

Last year, seven of South Dakota's 39 human West Nile cases came in the area around Aberdeen, which received $25,506 in state money for mosquito abatement. This year, the state gave Aberdeen and 176 other local governments only $1,100 worth of chemicals.

In Connecticut, lawmakers fighting over the state's budget still are considering cuts to the state's mosquito control efforts, while the federal money the state usually gets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing has been cut in half. The state tests and traps about 200,000 mosquitoes each year in 90 locations, looking for nine viruses, six of which can cause human disease.

The state and others in the Northeast are still waiting for their mosquito season to start, but on the heels of a rainy spring and early rainy summer, it's coming. Mosquito eggs require water to hatch, and warmer water and air temperatures accelerate the development from egg to adult mosquito.

"We're anticipating that we're going to get clobbered," said Theodore G. Andreadis, who oversees Connecticut's mosquito surveillance program, "as soon as the weather breaks and we move into a period of warm weather, which is undoubtedly going to occur."

In southeast Texas, Chastant got $700,000 this year to spray for bugs as director of Jefferson County's mosquito control district. Normally, that would be enough. But the county east of Houston was socked with rain by both Ike and Hurricane Rita in 2005, leaving behind plently of standing water in which the mosquitoes thrived and left behind millions of eggs.

"What we're finding out, the year after a hurricane is bad," Chastant said. "Those eggs are like tiny little time bombs. ... Then bunches of mosquitoes are looking for blood at the same time. ... Each female is capable of laying 200 eggs. So, do the math."