This week I started to write about spiders and ended up buying a book on mosquitoes. In the recently published book The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, author Timothy Winegard calculates nearly half the people who ever lived died of mosquito bites. To put things into a modern perspective, mosquitoes kill on average […]
malaria
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HumBug: Ethics of Annihilation
The Olympics in Rio and the Zika virus have brought an ongoing ethical debate to the fore. If in the future mankind can use genetic engineering to wipe out mosquitoes that carry horrible diseases, should we? Previously, I mentioned that the humble mosquito is considered to be the single deadliest animal on the planet, transmitting […]
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HumBug: Killer Wrigglers
Last night I mercilessly killed a couple hundred of the deadliest animals on the planet, maybe averted a plague and fed the hungry. I hardly worked up a sweat. Statistically, more human deaths (not to mention misery) are caused annually by mosquito borne diseases than those carried by any other critter. At last count they […]