Mites & bites

Sunny summer days on Kingsport beach - that’s my favourite summertime memory.

As my brothers and sisters splashed in the brook that flowed through the little cove near the bluff where Gram had a cottage, we watched, out of the corners of our eyes, the tide of picnickers who spread over the sands by the wharf on Labour Day. So many people! And, in the heat that rose from the red sand, so few mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes were the bane of our existence. Some days, we left the little basket houses we wove among the alders on the sides of the gully – hard to play House or War when scratching a mosquito bite every 30 seconds. In those days, little was made of mosquito bites. There were no mosquito-borne diseases and, when a person spent any time outside – and we all played outside - a bite or few was just to be expected. The torment had to be really bad, though, to drive us inside on a summer evening: when we went inside, we had to go to bed.

Once in a while, a mosquito would slip inside the cottage, in spite of window screens (Russell Lynes, who, in the ‘80s, wrote for Architectural Digest and contributed much to our understanding of the history of modern art, knew of the mosquito and its irritating ways, told us “the most humane contribution of the 19th Century to the preservation of sanity and good temper” was window screens) and swinging screen doors. The walls that divided the cottage into sleeping cubicles did not rise to the roof. One mosquito was every person’s mosquito! As Anita Koddick says, “If you think you are too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a

mosquito in the room.”

In recent years, we became more concerned about these fragile insects. It may be a baby can squash one without even trying, but there are so many of them and that straw- or needle-like proboscis is definitely not sterilized between injections. Nova Scotia has reported a few cases of malaria, but these all seem to be travel-related. What about the West Nile Virus? There was a big fuss about that, starting a few years ago, but now the worry seems to have shifted west.

Mosquitoes are responsible for more deaths than any other creature. World-wide, nearly four million people die of mosquito-borne diseases every year... though not yet in Canada.

While WNV causes, in some people, a mild flu-like illness and, in many, no symptoms at all, for those with compromised immune systems, WNV can develop into meningitis (inflamation of the lining of the spinal cord or brain) or encephalitis (inflamation of the brain itself). Yes, the concern about WNV is serious enough there are weekly Canadian reports about where and how often the disease occurs*. Not one infected mosquito has been found in Nova Scotia this season.

Still, I would recommend you remember to apply the DEET if you’re out and about in the company of mosquitoes. * http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/wn-no/symptom_e.html (Maps and Stats)