Friday, January 13, 2012

Autocidal Maniacs -- More News Than You Need Or Want

I just read a sentence that was so obscene, so unbelievable, that I had to hurry over here to give you the news that you really don't want to know.

It's calculated that mosquitoes have killed OVER 50% of all the human beings who have EVER LIVED. That's 468 billion people, people.

If it killed that many people, how many animals has it murdered? The mosquito's existence is a very powerful proof that there is no God, if you ask me. It causes the most horrific diseases you can imagine. Have you ever see someone with malaria? I have. We had a good friend in Kinshasa, Zaire, Africa (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) who came down with it.

One day Manfred, for that's what his name was, came over to the house, and he looked weird. Shortly thereafter he was bowing to the porcelain god, teeth chattering incessantly as he sweated buckets; I can't remember what went on from there, but we were freaked out. We had no idea what was wrong with him.

We found out later, and I made it a point NEVER to forget to take that little pill my parents gave us weekly. (Apparently he died young, very young. Malaria never quite goes away.)

So how to get rid of this evil pest? As you well know, they develop all sorts of immunities to whatever we throw at them. When we hit them with DDT in the 50s everything was a grand success -- their numbers in Africa and elsewhere were halved, if not more, and children -- who were the largest portion of the population that succumbed to malaria -- began to actually grow up.

Then some self-serving bitch named Rachel Carson, a (typically) misguided environmentalist, sounded the alarm on DDT and freaked the public out (in the US, mind you, where malaria was almost non-existent) which led to the worldwide ban of DDT. The children began to die again. (Thanks, Rachel, for killing untold numbers of children so you could sleep more comfortably in your feather bed each night, knowing your Meyer strawberries were unsullied by any trace of DDT.)

It wasn't until the 90s that limited spraying of DDT -- namely on the insides of the walls of the housing in infested areas -- was reintroduced.

But the problem still remains, and the mosquito is not going away. Recently, however a new tactic is being tried: changing the genes of the female mosquito so that it gives birth to female larvae that can't fly. How cool is that? Scientifically pulling the wings off mosquitoes!

Since it's only the female that bites, the males go around happily mating with these altered females and only the males survive to fly. Theoretically this should kill off the entire population, since they can't develop a resistance to gene-splicing.

I honestly don't know how I've escaped any mosquito-borne diseases. I was born in India (Calcutta) and lived there until I was ten. I don't recall being given any anti-malaria pills. I lived in the Congo for three years in my early teens, and apparently the pills worked (though at some point or another I must have missed doses). I lived in Senegal for a year when I was 17 and took no pills. But I escaped. (That wasn't the only horrific disease I magically escaped -- there's a very nasty parasite named Bilharzia, which you really, really don't want to get -- but I happily sloshed around in the river Congo . . . and got away completely unscathed (oh, forgot Candiru! No wait, that's the Amazon!)

So hopefully a little autocide will go a long way. I for one will never miss that little chainsaw buzzing in my ear at three o'clock in the morning.

Is this the face that brought down 468 billion?

No comments:

Post a Comment