Bill Gates
posted the graphic below to his blog on April 25.
It shows how many people are killed by different species of animal every year. The big red block at the bottom might surprise you:
"The number of mosquito-caused deaths really is a mind-blowing thing. Other than humans killing humans during periods of war, most years, the mosquito wins," the
Mosquito Week trailer says.
The reason?
Mosquitoes carry terrible diseases, including: malaria (which kills more than 600,000 people every year), dengue fever virus, Rift Valley fever virus, yellow fever, chikungunya virus, West Nile virus, Lymphatic filariasis, and Japanese encephalitis.
These mosquito-borne infections don't just kill - they debilitate millions of people. Sometimes these people can't work and can't support themselves. Billions of dollars in productivity is lost in places where these debilitating infections run rampant - fueled by mosquitoes.
The deadliest of all is malaria, a parasitic infection that mosquitoes inject directly into our bloodstream when they bite. The parasites then travel to the victim's liver, where they multiply and reproduce. Their babies travel the bloodstream, destroying the red blood cells.
Usually the infection doesn't kill, but it's so abundant in so much of the equatorial world that more than 200 million people are infected every year, and more than 700,000 die from the disease.
Here are the areas of the world where
Malaria is the worst, from the CDC:
© CDC
The site is doing a
whole series of posts for "Mosquito Week," including a post about "
What It Feels Like To Have Malaria."
Comment: Well, if Bill Gates says it "is so" it must be taken as "God's truth."
Stop, wait, hey there, isn't the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation responsible for the development of a
new breed of GMO mosquito that's going to save us all from dengue and malaria? "Quantity might also be a problem. "You are going to need to produce billions of these mosquitoes if this is ever going to work," Lines said."
Hmmm, I smell money (biomedical R&D grants/contracts,) do you?
It's
estimated that medical errors kill roughly 200,000 patients in the U.S. each year (I'm guessing this is a conservative estimate, too.) That does not even include deaths from pharmaceutical drug/vaccination allergies/reactions. Ponder that and decide where the focus and funds need to be directed...
Mosquitoes are going to be my biggest annoyance, but the chances they will be deadly to me are slim to none. This is just normal fare in forested, wetlandish Canada. I expect to be bitten between a few hundred and a few thousands of times this year. But it's actually quite rare to get human affecting infections from mosquitoes in the woods in Canada, especially out in the middle of nowhere, away from population centers. On some trips into the woods that I've taken into really buggy areas, after the first few days I stop caring about being bitten, because it's not worth the anxiety to care about it any more, and when you've been bitten regularly for years anyways when they sneak up on you, it's not really a war worth fighting. After a few days I stop getting big itchy reactions to bites anyways. You develop a tolerance to whatever they inject. I've looked up how much actual mosquito venom it would take to kill you, it's something like thousands upon thousands of bites in a day, it happens rarely. Woe upon those who watch me laying back while 20 mosquitoes alight on my bare legs, when they haven't gotten used to them yet. I think I actually traumatized somebody by doing that while they were twitchingly trying to protect themselves while in a t-shirt, fresh from the city. Eventually we end up lovingly calling the mosquitoes our "friends" because they like hanging around us so much.
This is one reason I like living in an area that has full-on winter AND summer. Many less pathogens and poisonous things because the yearly freeze kills everything. I'm sure if Canada was tropical, we'd have malaria here too.