Imagine: Darn Mosquitos!
by Joey Stewart
June ushers in summer and with it comes the darned
mosquito. We are all familiar with them, much to our chagrin; but what do we
really know about them.
They have been around forever! While the dinosaurs
roamed the earth even they, too, were bugged by them. They attacked them by
biting them in places where they had thinner skin. The dinosaurs, too, got sick
and died by the pathogens they left behind.
Today, mosquitoes are considered nature’s worst enemy
and the deadliest creatures on earth causing between 700,000 to one million
deaths annually.
Their danger stems from their roles as vectors for
deadly diseases rather than their physical attacks, making them a threat to
humanity.
The female needs blood to develop their eggs and in
the process the transmission of pathogens that cause malaria, dengue, yellow
fever, zika, West Nile virus, and other diseases is what makes them so deadly.
The Culex Pipiens, known as the West Nile mosquito,
has been confirmed in Edmonton and Southern Alberta.
A few years ago, we were in Bali. One morning in a
living room sized shower, with soap in my eyes I heard an enormous thump. When
I looked down, my husband was out cold on the floor. I raced to the room next
door where our friends from Quebec; Pierre and Celine were sleeping. I was
screaming. They raced over. Within 20 minutes the owner of our hotel had a
doctor beside my husband in the shower.
Two ambulance rides later with our devoted friends we
were in Denpasar, the capital of Bali and in a hospital with doctors
surrounding us. Their diagnosis: dengue fever from a mosquito bite a few days
before. We had no idea; we’d never heard of it before. The fall resulted in a
fractured anterior third vertebrae and a broken nose.
It took several weeks before my husband was fit to
travel home and when we got here, he saw his general practitioner, Dr. Lee. She
was puzzled by his case, not convinced it was dengue. She had worked in Haiti
and was familiar with mosquito borne diseases. Eventually, she diagnosed
chikungunya, another of the dratted mosquito borne diseases.
Since we have been home, a word that had never entered
our minds before, is now heard on radio and TV broadcasts.
So, what can we do about protecting ourselves from
mosquito borne irritations and diseases, at home and abroad? The US Center for
Disease Control (CDC) recommends:
1.
Get rid of standing water.
2.
Blow them away with a fan.
3.
Avoid peak hours around dawn and dusk when they are
most active.
4.
Apply DEET before going outdoors.
5.
Use other repellents if you don’t like DEET. The US
Center for Disease Control and Protection recommends picaridin (their
favourite), IR3535, oil of lemon eucalyptus, paramenthanediol PMD, or
2-undecanome.
6.
Try to stay cool. Mosquitos are drawn by pheromones
released in your sweat.
7.
Wear light, tightly woven, and light-coloured clothes.
8.
Carbon dioxide from your exhaled breath is how they
find you and so, avoid vigorous exercise, drinking alcohol, eating spicy foods,
or anything that cranks up your metabolism.
9.
Add plants to your garden that repels them like
citronella, lavender, lemongrass, marigolds, and basil.
10.
Spray your yard by hiring a professional.
11.
Avoid scented products.
As our climate is changing, mosquitos are migrating to
places they’ve never been seen before. So, none of us should be complacent
about our thinking that we are immune to more varieties here.
The CBC’s The Nature of Things has done a terrific
program on mosquitos that is worthwhile and there is a marvellous new book out,
a New York Times Bestseller, called The Mosquito: A Human History of our
Deadliest Predator by Timothy C. Winegard that I recommend if you want to
know more.
Bless winter for their demise!
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