Mosquitoes

“If you think you are too small to make a difference...try sleeping with a mosquito in the room.” –Dalai Lama

Am I one of only a handful of South Africans who sleeps under a mosquito net? Spring, summer, and autumn nights in KZN I drape the black net over my bed and chuckle with satisfaction as I climb under it. Add the sound of a frustrated mosquito or two buzzing outside the net trying to get at my blood …and satisfaction turns to bliss. 

Judging by results of my informal poll (limited since I conduct it by simply asking) I understand few ware (authentic) South Africans living between Durban and the Drakensberg sleep under nets. If a net or two hangs in a South African household, it’s decorative rather than functional and color-coordinated to match the décor. On the other hand, empirical evidence pending, I assume smart South Africans who live along the country’s hotter and more humid north and north eastern borders sleep under nets. That region is closer to countries that host the Anopheles mosquitoes that carries the malaria-causing Plasmodium parasite. (A net seems a critical item where more than 40 percent of the world's population live in malaria-risk areas and an estimated 300-600 million people suffer from the disease each year.  Find one of many programs supplying nets to needy people simply by searching the Internet on "mosquito net donation." ) 

My mosquito net is black. I’d prefer white. But I dislike shopping and when I purchased my net at Cost Plus in Oakland, California my desire to exit the store and the consuming experience overrode the necessity of reading the label. Why stick around to read labels when “everyone” who’s ever watched a movie about Intrepid Colonials in Darkest Africa knows that mosquito nets are white? Imagine my surprise to arrive in KZN and find I’m the dubious owner of a black mosquito net. Over the eighteen years, off-an-on, that I’ve hunkered under the net that very few mosquitoes have penetrated I’ve developed loyalty toward yet no affection for it. (I can’t shake the feeling I’m under a Transylvanian shroud.) As much as I hanker for a white net, tossing out something that functions as expected and buying the same item in a different color (or no color) goes against my tenet of conservative consumption. 
Nevertheless, in May 2018 hankering gave way to full-blown covetousness when Britain’s newest (adult) princess, Megan Markle, revealed the trailing veil of her £100,000 wedding costume. (Consider paying that much for an outfit worn once:  US $134,300; ZAR 1,724,388; € 114,165. How many mosquito nets could that supply? Duchess Kate's gown, "a custom Alexander McQueen design…rumored to be worth US $434,000" also could have made a huge dent in annual malaria fatalities. But why bother the Royals with the needs of the little people when the Royal Family is busy paying for

core aspects of the [recent] wedding: the church service, the associated music, flowers, decorations, and the reception afterwards" estimated at “upwards of £500,000.” Cheap in comparison to “Prince William and Duchess Kate's 2011 London nuptials… US $32 million.” Security costs? “a special £3.6 million ($4.8 million) grant was used to cover overtime pay for officers.”)

(c) Photos: Town and Country magazine. 

 

Rest easy, ye Britons for the recent "wedding is expected to provide a £500 million pound boost to the country's economy in the form of tourism, commemorative merchandise, and essentially ‘free advertising for Britain.’” Here’s an idea for “free advertising for Britain,” particularly for a Royal Family in need of positive publicity: trim those veils into mosquito nets and sell them. Not only would nets protect Britain’s former African subjects from malaria they might mitigate in a tiny way the colonialism's fallout .  

Questions of taste 

Ware (authentic) South Africans claim mosquitoes don’t bother them. In the company of ware South Africans, I’m usually the only person swatting the annoying bugs. They also appear inured to bites. Do mosquitoes avoid blood flavored with boerewors, Nik Naks, samosas, and mealie meal and find irresistible blood flavored with Pete’s coffee, San Francisco Sourdough bread, and high fructose corn syrup?

According to an expert, mosquitoes do seek a type and a taste: “Some people produce more of certain chemicals in their skin...and a few of those chemicals, like lactic acid, attract mosquitoes.” Blood type O attracts mosquitoes more than types A and B, so does “metabolic rate…the amount of carbon dioxide your body releases as it burns energy.” 


I don’t use a mosquito net in Alameda, my lovely island hometown in the San Francisco Bay Area (population seventy-seven thousand, 46.8 percent home-ownership). Alameda hosts generic mosquitoes –neither the malaria parasite-bearing Anopheles nor the Zika virus bearing Aedes varieties—and it deals with them in a novel way: an abatement program. Property owners pay an annual tax of $1.00 (ZAR 12.80; £ 0.75; €0.85) in support of mosquito genocide. While that’s cheap enough that households don’t complain, judging by robust proboscis activity on my patio, results are less than stellar. I echo the Dalai Lama: “If you think you are too small to make a difference...try sleeping with a mosquito in the room” …or on the patio. I employ an abatement technology: window and door screens. A (gray colored) mosquito net for my entire residence.

Mosquito miscellanea

Forced to choose between KZN’s summer heat or itchy welts, I choose the former. I work at my desk with my tantalizing flesh hidden under long pants and high collared, long-sleeved shirts, long woolen socks bunched around my ankles and calves. Proboscises penetrate anyway and, as bugs lay siege to my blood, they deposit the evolutionary wonder that is their saliva into my flesh. Besides the histamines that cause blood vessels around the bite to dilate and swell, the saliva’s anticoagulants guarantee a victim’s blood cannot clot and trap a mosquito by its proboscis.

The Dalai Lama wonders whether mosquitoes are capable of gratitude for all the free blood they extract. To gauge their appreciation he admits that, when in a good mood, he allows mosquitoes to feed on his blood. He reports,  “Their whole body [sic] becomes red… [but] there is no indication of appreciation.” He urges scientists to conduct research. (I’m curious about a Dalai Lama having moods. A basic tenet of Buddhism holds that people are not helpless victims of emotions, i.e., moods. When the Dalai Lama’s in a bad mood does he violate another tenet of Buddhism and kill mosquitoes?)

The only tenet held by our esteemed current president, The Donald, is self-aggrandizement. Mosquito-like, The Art of the Deal-meister pompously repeats to the nation and the world that “caravans of migrants” continue “to steal our country.” Yet, still no deal with Mexico to pay for a more robust southern border wall nor an end to Trump’s fantasy of tides of invaders from “shithole” countries.  

The length of the US/Mexico border is somewhere between 1,933 and 1,991 miles.  (See the US southern border wall... and co-incidentally, Israel’s wall.  FYI: the wall will be built by Israeli company, Elta North America.)

If Megan Markle didn’t donate her veil to former British colonies in malarial Africa, she could string it along the border. It might improve international relations and humanely resist invaders and virus-bearing bugs. (Israel’s Elta North America might object: it's bill for building the wall is currently estimated at $25 billion.)

Then again, a mosquito net would remind Trump, a self-proclaimed germaphobe, that he likes squashing people like bugs. That’s just one small step from him stumbling onto what he'd consider a politically astute meme: associating disease to immigrants and immigration. Such a heartless, vulgar, and fear mongering meme is perfect for The Donald’s binary us-versus-them worldview.

The exponential power of a small bug when used to block US bound immigrants from Zika hotspots: Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, and Venezuela...and from “shithole” countries….