Skeeters and Zika

There’s nothing sneakier than mosquitos. So it’s time to slap at yet another skeeter story today, even though we considered the topic last December. Back then, I looked at how the latest gene splicing techniques might be enlisted to combat malaria. Meanwhile, a mosquito-borne virus called “Zika” has been working its way into global headlines.

As of now, much of the Zika news is focused on South America. But if you’re feeling upstaged, I’ll note that Micronesia was actually part of the story before the story went prime time. That’s because Yap experienced a Zika outbreak in 2007.

On that note, a Barcelona Centre for International Health Research report, “Zika Virus Outbreak on Yap Island,” by Ned Hayes, M.D., is available on the Web.

The symptoms most often listed were a rash and a fever, and having the virus was described as “generally mild and self-limited.”

Yap’s outbreak, according to the report, was the first outbreak of Zika, although the virus itself was already known to scientists. The virus was discovered in Uganda’s Zika forest in 1947. Hey, now we know where the name comes from. As for how the virus got to Yap, well, that’s listed as a question mark.

Speaking of question marks, I don’t know if Zika’s path will put Micronesia back on its itinerary. Fortunately, it’s not my job to know such things. No, my job is to settle down in my beach chair, make nice conversation with people, and occasionally squint at the horizon with long gazes so it looks like I’m thinking deep thoughts even though I’m really daydreaming about cheeseburgers.

So here’s my distant-gaze thought: Mosquitos and viruses aren’t impressive organisms viewed against a human scale of complexity, but they have far quicker feedback loops for their evolution. Those creatures can play a million hands of biological blackjack and double down on their winning mutations before a human can even get a free cocktail at the table.

When it comes to bugs and germs, time is their alley, not ours.

These uneven odds bring to mind a quote attributed to mathematician and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “Time is smarter than you.”

That’s a humbling notion, and certainly a true one.

Speaking of time, despite some promising advances in fancy stuff like genetic engineering on the laboratory front, the neck-slapping level of skeeter fighting doesn’t seem to have advanced much in recent times. Lacking a breakthrough in recency, then, I’ll revert to primacy. So I still use the same type of mosquito repellent that I was using 30 years ago. No, I’m not trying to be stubborn, but I simply haven’t found anything else that seems to work better, at least in the circumstances I’ve faced.

I have, however, found a good resource for the modern world of skeeters. It’s a site called “Mosquito Research and Management,” written by Dr. Cameron Webb, an Australian entomologist. I’ll put the URL on a separate line, in hopes that it doesn’t get dissected by a line break. Here it is:

CameronWebb.Wordpress.com

The site has many links to Zika information, and it has also has a free, 12-page guide with a lot of wisdom, “Beating the bite of mosquito-borne disease: A guide to personal protection strategies against Australian mosquitoes.” I think it’s safe to assume that those of us not in Australia can still glean some good information here.

On the biology note, here are a couple of tidbits of information from that guide. It says that in the warmer months, mosquitos can go from egg to adult in less than one week. It also says that adult mosquitos typically live for up to three weeks. Well, now we know. Those critters sure do cause a lot of mischief in their brief little lives.

As much as I don’t like mosquitos, I’ve had it easier than my wife did when she was growing up. Her home in the Philippines had no air-conditioning, so its windows were always open but the windows didn’t have screens. Everyone slept under mosquito netting and sometimes they burned anti-mosquito coils inside the house.

The reason that my little bottle of bug repellent has duct tape wrapped around it is so the tape can be used to secure mosquito netting when afield. This approach can get a lot of mileage as long as the repellent doesn’t get on the tape (it will mess up the tape) and as long as the tape is husbanded by taking it off in thin strips instead of full-width strips. This technique may well be my only contribution to humanity’s pool of knowledge, so I figure that now that I’ve shared it, the least you can do is buy me lunch.

And you can always tell when I’m up for lunch: It’s when I’m gazing at the horizon.