3 Strikes Mean Medfly May Be Out on Loose : Environment: A third pest is found in two weeks. Officials, having learned political and scientific lessons from last infestation, are not planning aerial spraying.

Less than a year after agricultural officials claimed victory in a bruising battle with the Mediterranean fruit fly in Southern California, their worst nightmare has come true: The tiny yellow-bellied pest is back.

An adult male Medfly was trapped Sunday in the Mid-City area of Los Angeles, officials said Monday. It was found not far from two Koreatown neighborhoods where a mated female and an adult male were discovered earlier this month. The three trappings, all within the quarantine area set up by the state after the first discovery on Oct. 7, have raised fears that another Medfly infestation may be in the offing.

“I just threw my hands down on the desk and said, ‘Oh, no, not again!’ ” said Michael Durando, president of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League, a trade association whose members gross $1 billion annually. “We didn’t need this.”

The state’s last encounter with the notorious crop-destroying insect dragged on for 16 months, cost $52 million in eradication measures and generated a political uproar across Southern California about the aerial spraying of malathion over several hundred square miles of residential neighborhoods.

This time, agricultural officials insist, things will be different--thanks in large part to the grueling political and scientific lessons of the 1989-90 campaign.

“Recognizing that helicopters are noisy and an intrusion, we are doing everything we can to avoid aerial applications,” said Leon Spaugy, Los Angeles County agricultural commissioner. “One of the lessons that we learned last year was to move cautiously.”

It has been two weeks since the first Medfly was trapped in a peach tree on South Catalina Street, and there has been virtually no talk of returning to the air the dreaded fleet of malathion-spewing helicopters.

Instead, on the advice of the state’s Medfly Science Advisory Panel, crews have been walking door-to-door in two Koreatown-area neighborhoods, politely asking permission to spray malathion bait on back-yard fruit trees and shrubbery. Last week, the first week of hand combat, only one of 177 affected property owners refused to cooperate.

On Monday, crews began knocking on the doors of an additional 75 homes in the Koreatown area, and today they are scheduled to start ground spraying in the 1500 block of 5th Avenue, the Mid-City neighborhood where the third fly was found in an orange tree.

“I think maybe they are finally starting to realize that they can’t afford to alienate the communities,” said Patty Prickett, chairwoman of Residents Against Spraying Pesticides, one of several groups that protested aerial spraying in 1989 and 1990. “They must be very embarrassed to have to admit that it is not really gone.”

Roy Cunningham, a federal entomologist who is chairman of the Medfly advisory panel, said the approach was also grounded in science. The neighborhoods where the Medflies were discovered are being crammed with traps--about 1,000 per square mile--to determine how serious the infestation has grown.

“We are doing a very intense look to see what is out there before we react with a large-scale program,” said Cunningham, a Medfly expert with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Any time you don’t respond immediately with an aerial bait spray, there is an increased risk some back-yard grower is going to take some fruit to his auntie 100 miles down the road. But we feel it is an acceptable risk because of the increased trapping.”

The new approach is part of a concerted public relations effort intended to assure pesticide-weary residents that the state wants to work with them--not against them--in the latest assault on the Medfly. It represents a sharp departure from past eradication efforts, when state officials were largely indifferent to public attitudes, insisting that virtually no cost was too high to rid the region of the potentially devastating pest.

“Even though we recognize that there are certain limitations with ground bait applications, it doesn’t meet with nearly the public resistence as the aerial bait applications,” Spaugy said. “In meeting with elected officials in the past, they have largely indicated that ground bait application . . . would be much preferable.”

Los Angeles Councilman Nate Holden, who represents most of Koreatown and Mid-City, said he would oppose any effort to introduce helicopter spraying. Holden, who complained of being sickened by the malathion spraying last year, said the pesticide is unhealthful, despite government denials.

“I think they learned their lesson last time,” Holden said. “They spent millions of dollars and they solved nothing.”

In 1989, it took just five days after a tiny fly was trapped near Dodger Stadium for state officials to dispatch helicopters with malathion bait over a section of Los Angeles. Before the assault was over, thousands of gallons of the pesticide had been sprayed for 100 days over 536 square miles in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

That aggressive offensive was in keeping with the state Medfly battle plan--a set of guidelines known as the “protocol”--that triggers aerial spraying upon the discovery of one mated female, two males or any larvae. The aerial campaign continued despite protests by residents complaining of health problems, sick pets and damage to car paint, as well as a barrage of lawsuits and city ordinances intended to force a halt to the spraying.

Agricultural officials say the protocol may need revising to reflect changing philosophies about when to begin aerial spraying, but they said helicopter applications have not been ruled out in Koreatown if the outbreak worsens. Officials are counting on their go-slow strategy to engender greater public cooperation if employing the aerial option becomes necessary.

“I think it would be difficult to refute that we have been very sensitive to the public outcry over the use of helicopters, and that we have demonstrated that we have attempted to do whatever we could within our current means of containing the pest,” Spaugy said. “I think people would then recognize that it had gotten beyond our means or capability, and we are hopeful that they would then be more considerate of using the helicopters.”

Ever since the first Medfly outbreak in 1975, elected officials and bureaucrats have faced the difficult task of balancing the demands of the state’s powerful agricultural interests with those of its city dwellers. Farmers have urged immediate action to wipe out the pest--no matter where it surfaces--while urban residents have worried about the effect of pesticide spraying on their health and property.

In some respects, the politics of the Medfly have come full circle.

In 1981, then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. waited a full year after the discovery of a Medfly in San Jose before ordering aerial spraying of pesticides. The delay, based on environmental and health concerns, allowed a small infestation in Santa Clara County to grow into a statewide outbreak, significantly damaging Brown’s political career and costing the state’s farm industry $100 million.

When the Medfly was trapped near Dodger Stadium in 1989, state officials were determined not to repeat Brown’s mistake. Largely following the advice of scientists--rather than politicians--agricultural officials immediately ordered aerial spraying and other eradication measures.

But the crafty Medfly persisted for 16 months, spawning a popular revolt against aerial spraying and reversing, to some degree, the political lessons of a decade ago.

“Now we are always in semi-readiness to organize,” said Prickett, of Residents Against Spraying Pesticides. “The thing sort of hits you like a thief in the night.”

State agricultural officials acknowledge that “emotional hysteria”--as one of them described opposition to aerial spraying--has been largely responsible for the relatively low-key response to the Koreatown and Mid-City outbreak. But they also point to differences between the 1989-90 infestation and this one.

In the earlier outbreak, for example, it was quickly evident that the infestation was severe; 277 Medflies ultimately were trapped. The 1989-1990 infestation also extended over portions of four counties, while the flies trapped this month were found about 1 1/2 miles apart.

“We also feel we have the tools this time, that we didn’t have last time, to prevent a widespread Medfly problem,” said Carl DeWing, spokesman for the state Department of Food and Agriculture.

Chief among the tools are the new traps being used to detect the severity of the current outbreak. Thousands of traps have been set in the three neighborhoods where the Medflies were discovered this month, and there are also 10 traps per square mile throughout Los Angeles County. Before the previous infestation, there were only five traps per square mile countywide.

Equally important, the state has access to an abundant supply of sterile Medflies that could be used to breed the pest out of existence. State and federal laboratories in Hawaii are capable of breeding nearly 750 million sterile flies a week, DeWing said. In 1989, the supply of sterile flies was exhausted by December, forcing the state Department of Food and Agriculture to resort to repeated aerial sprayings over some neighborhoods.

Representatives from the state’s farming industry by and large have supported the decision to attack the Koreatown and Mid-City outbreak with ground spraying and an aggressive trapping program. But Durando, president of the grape and tree fruit league, said that if trapping uncovers a significant infestation, farmers will begin calling for the helicopters.

“The only thing that separates the San Joaquin Valley and L.A. is the Tehachapi Mountains,” Durando said. “If that Medfly makes it over the mountains, there would be headlines everywhere.”