What is the most dangerous animal on Earth?
By Chelsie Vandaveer
May 21, 2003
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They often work from trucks traveling the roads and streets at night when most people are asleep or fretting about the next day's activities. Without them, road and barge crews couldn't work safely, children would not be safe on playgrounds, dinner on the patio would risk infection, spending a day fishing would bring home more than fish, swimming, hiking, jogging, gardening—any of these activities could be the last outdoor activity one had from life. Their work is not glamorous; it is long and tedious, filled with its own hazards. They battle the single most dangerous animal on Earth;
they are the mosquito control officers.
There are an estimated 3000 species in 28 genera of mosquitoes on Earth. Mosquitoes get the energy they need by taking nectar from flowers, juices oozing from damaged or rotting fruit, and sap bleeding from plants. A few species of mosquitoes do not bite at all. Of the rest of the species, only the female mosquito bites. She cannot lay her eggs without a blood meal. She injects saliva into the wound to prevent the blood from clotting. The saliva contains enzymes (proteins) which as foreign bodies, causes a localized allergic reaction—the wheal and itch associated with the bite.
As irritating as a mosquito bite can be, it is the parasitic and viral diseases she can inject along with her saliva—Dengue and Yellow Fevers, Rift Valley Fever, or Equine, West Nile, Japanese, St. Louis, or La Crosse encephalitides, or the disease thought to have wiped out civilizations, malaria. Some of these diseases attack both humans and animals; but Dengue and Yellow Fevers and malaria are human to human via the mosquito.
In 1999 in the United States, only seven people died of malaria, probably caught while traveling to tropical countries. (WHO Mortality Database) According to World Health Organization, 300- to 500-million will contract malaria in any given year; one million, mostly children in tropical countries, will die of the disease.
One may be bitten by the odd mosquito walking from home to car and think mosquito control is a waste of money, but mosquitoes, as vectors of disease have killed more humans than all wars in history. It is even thought that half of the humans that ever lived were killed by mosquito-borne malaria. ("Portrait of a serial killer", John Whitfield, Nature, 3 October 2002)
Malaria is caused by parasites of the human liver and bloodstream—Plasmodium malariae, P. vivax, P. falciparum, and P. ovale. Strictly a disease of humans, malaria is vectored from person to person by Anopheles mosquitoes. Titus Bradley with the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Leicester, has created an excellent page on malaria, Biology of Plasmodium Parasites and Anopheles Mosquitos. To learn more, click on the link:
http://www-micro.msb.le.ac.uk/224/Bradley/Biology.html
The Center for Disease Control has produced several informative articles on mosquito-borne viral diseases. To learn more about Dengue and Yellow Fevers and the numerous forms of Encephalitis, click on the link:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/diseases/list_mosquitoborne.htm
Follow links on the page about the diseases.
killerPlants Tendrils: ~~1~~2~~3~~4~~5~~
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Who was José Celestino Mutis? Plants that Changed History - May 20, 2003
What is gin and tonic? What's in a Name? - May 23, 2003
Who smuggled quinine seeds for the British? Plants that Changed History - May 27, 2003
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