Mosquitoes And Mosquito Bites

Surely just the most dedicated of entomologists and the most ardent followers of Buddha can truthfully say that they like mosquitoes. The others of us in the world loathe them. The word 'mosquito' comes from either the Spanish or the Portuguese and means 'little fly'. They live in most countries all over the world and are or have been responsible for spreading a range of diseases throughout history.

Malaria is the disease most commonly connected with mosquitoes and at one time malaria was endemic in Europe. Even London was a malarial city until they drained the marshes to make space for more housing a couple of hundred years ago. Until a hundred years ago, malaria was not thought to be connected with mosquitoes, it was thought to be brought on by 'bad air' ('mal aria').

Mosquitoes are blood-sucking insects, or at least the females are, that are still responsible for spreading many diseases throughout the animal kingdom. That is correct! They do not just have an effect on humans. Dogs in particular get a pretty hard time from mosquitoes.

For a large part of their lives, mosquitoes happily drink nectar from flowers like bees do, but whilst the female is pregnant, she needs animal protein to produce eggs. This is what she obtains from us and other animals. The male never has to drink blood.

It is whilst the female is drawing a little blood, that an infected mosquito inadvertently puts a few parasites into the host's blood stream, which could cause infection with malaria, dengue, encephalitis or many other diseases that are spread by parasites.

Not all bites from infected mosquitoes bring illness. In the case of malaria for instance, it has been suggested that a healthy person can fight off the parasites injected by up to fifty mosquitoes in a twenty-four hour period. After that though, the parasites grow in number too quickly for our defences and get to the organs that they like to inhabit.

When a non-infected mosquito draws blood from an infected human, that mosquito can pass the parasites on to other non-infected humans. It is thought that most mosquito bites happen indoors when the person is sleeping. Therefore, the WHO and other agencies have been distributing mosquito nets treated with pesticide in Africa, where most victims of mosquito borne infections live.

However, there is a concern that treating the difficulty in this fashion may make some kinds of mosquito immune to the insecticide or might even raise the chances of being bitten outdoors. There have been similar concerns in Cambodia. Until recently, it took three days of hospitalization to cure a patient of malaria, but in one region of Cambodia it now takes five days.

Doctors treating patients in that area say that this is a very disturbing development. It is considered that if this local development spreads, then it could result in the deaths of millions of Africans again.

Most mosquitoes do not travel far. Most mosquitoes never go farther than two kilometres from where they hatched out; some move only a couple of metres away, although others can fly some 5 or 10 kilometres, and a very few species will even fly up to 50 kilometres, helped by the wind, from their pupal habitats.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on several topics, but is currently concerned with work on mosquito bite allergy problems. If you would like to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our website at Mosquito Bite Swelling.