The mosquito in history

Last updated on: September 13, 2019 at 11:34 pm by Dan Peterson

The mosquito in history 2019-09-13T23:34:21-06:00 Dan Peterson

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An adult saltpool mosquito in Wellington, New Zealand
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

I will, alas, almost certainly never read the book. Life is short. But the review of The Mosquito, by Timothy Winegard, in the 3 August 2019 issue of The Economist was fascinating. Here are some notes that I’ve taken from that review:

During World War Two, American troops stationed in Asia were said to face two lethal enemies. The first enemy, of course, was the Japanese. To illustrate that point, as if it needed illustration, one wartime propaganda poster showed a Japanese saber that was covered with blood. (Japanese soldiers often used sabers, among other things for the brutal beheading of prisoners of war.) The other enemy was the mosquito, carrying no saber but still very much involved with blood. At one time or another, approximately 60% of all Americans in the Pacific theater were infected by mosquitos carrying malaria.

There were some helpful drugs, but their side effects were commonly very unpleasant, so some soldiers failed to take their daily doses. (If the burdens of countering a relatively distant threat are too high, people will tend to forego the countermeasures: Most twenty-year-olds won’t be induced to go light on delicious desserts in order to avoid developing diabetes in their sixties. Most soldiers, my father told me, abandoned their heavy, bulky gas masks soon after receiving them, preferring instead to live with the risk thatHitler might be tempted to resort to chemical warfare in the final days of the Third Reich.) In Papua, New Guinea, a sign hanging below two human skulls informed American GIs that “These Men Didn’t Take Their Atabrine.”

The author of The Mosquito reports that insect-borne yellow fever raged in the area of Memphis, Tennessee, well into the 1800s, and that malaria once killed over 20% of the population in the fenlands of eastern England — e.g., around Cambridge. (Latter-day Saints will recall that malaria was the leading cause of death in early Nauvoo, Illinois, as well.) In fact, Winegard estimates, mosquitos may have killed roughly half of all humans ever born. They still kill approximately 800,000 people each year, and the Zika virus, carried by infected mosquitos, continues to spread. Quite justly, he calls the mosquito a “destroyer of worlds.”

And so powerful a little animal cannot have been without influence on the direction of human history. Winegard argues, for instance, that mosquitos helped to save the Romans from Hannibal and, more than a millennium later, Europe from the Mongols. Moreover, the fact that some Africans were immune to malaria made them excellent candidates for slavery in the New World. By the same token, though, after Toussaint L’Ouverture launched his slave rebellion in Haiti, at least 66% — Winegard claims an amazing 85% — of the soldiers sent there by France to put it down died from mosquito-borne diseases, and Haiti gained its independence.

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