The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  After American arbitration efforts were sneered at by the Spanish, the battle cruiser USS Maine was sent to Havana Harbor to protect American shipping, property, profit, and other economic assets. In February 1898, a mysterious explosion, blamed on a Spanish mine, rocked the Maine and killed 266 sailors.* The infuriated American public, stirred to a frenzy by sensationalized reporting, demanded action under the popular slogan “Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!” By April 1898, the US Navy initiated a blockade of the island, and Congress issued a declaration of war against Spain and her colonies. When the first Americans waded ashore in late June at the onset of mosquito season, only 25% of the Spanish force of 200,000 was healthy enough to fight. “It is something awful to see,” reported the Spanish surgeon in chief from Cuba. “Those ignorant, sickly peasants brought here from Spain to defend the Spanish flag are dying by the hundreds every day.” The Americans, however, were also bitten by Cuba’s legendary mosquitoes.

  After his chain of superiors was killed or incapacitated by yellow fever, a fresh-faced and eager Theodore Roosevelt unexpectedly assumed command of his regiment. Roosevelt’s fortuitous mosquito-influenced battlefield promotion would thrust him into the national spotlight. “The battle that was to follow at San Juan Hill,” writes David Petriello, “was to propel the young Assistant Secretary of the Navy to the presidency, a situation only made possible by the illness that upset the pre-established command structure.” In truth, when Colonel Roosevelt and his small detachment of volunteer Rough Riders walked up the hill, they were greeted by Lieutenant John “Black Jack” Pershing and a group of African American “Buffalo Soldiers” who had already crested the summit and scattered its defenders. Nevertheless, Roosevelt boastingly exaggerated his battlefield prowess to reporters and grabbed national headlines.

  The war in Cuba lasted only a few months, attaining a reputation as a “Splendid Little War.” The quick American victory was secured by 23,000 total troops at a cost of only 379 servicemen killed in combat. Another 4,700, however, died of mosquito-borne disease. When these shocking casualty returns filtered back to Washington, it was quickly understood by politicians and investors that the mosquito was the paramount obstacle to unlocking the economic potential of Cuba and incorporating its riches into the larger American mercantilist market. This dire situation of life-sucking mosquito-borne disease was not lost on military men with boots on the ground, guiding strategy in Cuba either. Prolonged military involvement on the island would be tantamount to mosquito-inflicted suicide. Dislodging the Spanish was one thing; contesting the mosquito with an army of occupation was quite another. Help, however, would soon be on the way.

  America’s initial voyages of imperialism during the Spanish-American War were tied to epidemiology and forever altered the global world order. Science and technological innovation gave us new weapons in our war with the mosquito. She could no longer fly below the radar. The ancient miasma theory, which had been the prevailing school of thought for the cause of disease for over 3,000 years, was now expunged and flushed out of circulation. Like most historical events, the discovery of the mosquito as the vector for multiple contagions, including filariasis, malaria, and yellow fever, was tied directly to global empire, mercantilism, and capitalism in Cuba, Panama, and beyond.

  By the 1880s, the miasma and humoral models of Hippocratic medicine were being replaced with modern germ theories. Early researchers of mosquito-borne disease were operating under the scientific umbrella of the germ theory postulated and proven by Louis Pasteur (French), Robert Koch (German), and Joseph Lister (British) beginning in the 1850s.* Advancements in science and medical instruments, including the microscope, allowed for a more complete and advanced study of disease. The mosquito and her pathogens could no longer hide in the shadows of scientific simplicity and medical ignorance. Of course, boasting a planet-consuming population of 110 trillion, mosquitoes had never actually attempted to be clandestine or inconspicuous. After all, they have been flying in our face for eternity.

  In the decades following the monumental discovery of the germ or microorganism theory of disease, a handful of mosquito hunters finally cornered her and broadcast to the world that at last our ultimate, previously indestructible, enemy had been arraigned for her crimes against humanity stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. With numerous medical bounty hunters pursuing her across the planet, arresting the mosquito was a collective international effort.

  After millions of years of discreetly smuggling misery and death, the mosquito was unmasked in a swift series of scientific discoveries. First, in 1877, British physician Patrick Manson positively incriminated the mosquito as the vector of filariasis, or elephantiasis, while stationed at the British outpost of Hong Kong. For the first time in history, Manson had definitively coupled an insect to the transmission of disease. Although lacking corroborating scientific evidence, Manson then postulated that the mosquito also delivered malaria.

  Three years later in 1880, while peering through his crude microscope, Dr. Alphonse Laveran, a French military physician assigned to the colony of Algeria, noticed something strange. Small spherical foreign bodies were swimming in the blood sample of a patient admitted with “marsh fever.” Upon further study, he correctly identified these bodies as four distinct forms in the life cycle of the malaria parasite. By 1884, he theorized that the mosquito was the method of delivery for this biological killer. Similarly, an American physician and veteran of the Civil War (serving as a surgeon for both sides) with the dazzling name Albert Freeman Africanus King implicated the mosquito in 1882, boldly suggesting, “You can have mosquitoes without malaria . . . but you cannot have malaria without mosquitoes.” King’s flawless assertion was rejected and ridiculed when he posited that Washington, DC, should be enclosed by a 600-foot-tall mosquito safety net.* The discoveries of Manson, King, and Laveran kick-started the field of malariology, leading to what historian James Webb calls a “trio of discoveries in 1897” by Ronald Ross, Giovanni Grassi, and our germ theorist Robert Koch.

  Ronald Ross was a rather uninspiring British doctor born in India to a general in the British Army. Ross was an altogether improbable and dubious candidate to expose the preeminent killer of humankind. To appease his father, he grudgingly attended medical school, but he spent most of his time procrastinating, writing plays and novellas, and otherwise daydreaming. Ross did so poorly on his exams that when he graduated in 1881, his credentials allowed him to practice medicine only in British India, where he spent the next thirteen years bouncing from one assignment to another. On a brief trip to London in 1894, he met Manson, who took the lackluster young doctor under his wing and mentored him on his own malaria research. Given India’s endemic malaria, Manson prodded Ross to return to his post to produce concrete evidence of his own malaria-mosquito theory. “If you succeed in this, you will go up like a shot and get any facilities you may ask for,” he told his young apprentice and squire. “Look on it as the Holy Grail and yourself as a Sir Galahad.” Upon his return to India, Ross immediately made the hospital rounds, stalking malaria patients.

  He spent the next three years with his face buried in a microscope, squinting at dissected mosquitoes. His research notes and his descriptions of what he was spying through the lens indicate that, for the most part, he did not know what the hell he was looking at or looking for. He hated the natural sciences and had no clue about the actual biological workings of mosquitoes. His original mosquito experiments, for example, were conducted on species that did not and could not vector malaria. He complained that these mosquito test subjects were “obstinate as mules” for refusing to bite, which is akin to scolding a chestnut as lazy for refusing to fall. In the meantime, an Italian zoologist, Giovanni Grassi, was also persistently poking and prodding mosquitoes to unveil the malaria parasite that inflicted endemic misery and death across his country.

  In 1897, both Ross and Grassi finally had their “aha” breakthrough moments. Ross discovered that mo
squitoes were the vector for avian malaria and postulated with insufficient evidence from ongoing trials that the same must be true for human malaria. Grassi beat Ross to the finish line by conclusively proving that the Anopheles mosquito was the distributer of human malaria. These simultaneous discoveries set off a professional feud and smear campaign between the two men comparable to that of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla in the early twentieth century.* Much to Grassi’s anger and resentment, Ross’s public relations campaign prevailed, and he won the Nobel Prize in 1902, with Laveran accompanying him in 1907.

  The last of the trio of 1897 discoveries belonged to Robert Koch, who won the Nobel Prize in 1905. Working out of the malaria-plagued colony of German East Africa, the distinguished bacteriologist scientifically confirmed that quinine cleansed human blood of the malaria parasite as had been championed for 250 years since it allegedly first cured the beautiful countess of Chinchon in Peru. “These three epochal discoveries struck a destabilizing blow to miasmatic theory,” Webb concludes. “In the years after 1897 the theory of miasma was dead in the water.”

  Mosquito-borne malaria, the cause of limitless and unrivaled suffering and billions of deaths since the dawn of humankind, was exposed. Our nameless archnemesis that had been stalking us since our creation had finally been unmasked. This lethal bond between the mosquito and the scourge of malaria was laid bare by the collective weight of science. With the cause of this affront to humanity revealed, surely a foolproof treatment or vaccine would quickly follow. Or alternatively, this verminous abomination, destroyer of worlds, could be exterminated. After all, malaria was caused only by the small, worthless mosquito. Right?

  With this realization, the mosquito was the subject of intense study and scrutiny. If she was the sole delivery system for filariasis and malaria, what other deadly poisons did she discharge from her proboscis? And though her lethal yellow fever viral weaponry remained undetected for the time being, with the mosquito attracting so much scientific scrutiny, it too could not hide forever. Embroiled with both the Spanish and yellow fever in Cuba since April 1898, to reap the whirlwind of the island’s capitalistic opportunity, the Americans needed to defang the dreaded Black Vomit once and for all.

  Witnessing the destructive power of yellow fever on his troops in Cuba, the American commander General William Shafter declared that the mosquito was “a thousand times harder to stand up against than the missiles of the enemy.” With the Spanish surrender in August 1898 after only four months of combat, military commanders realized the inherent dangers of maintaining an occupation force in Cuba. Yellow fever and malaria began to spread among US troops. In a letter to President McKinley, Shafter reported that his force was “an army of convalescents” with 75% unfit for service.

  A second straightforward letter signed by numerous generals (and Colonel Roosevelt) known as the “Round Robin” candidly forewarned Congress, “If we are kept here it will in all human possibility mean an appalling disaster, for the surgeons here estimate that over half the army, if kept here during the sickly season, will die.” The dispatch closed with the blunt caveat: “This army must be moved at once or it will perish. As an army it can be safely moved now. Persons responsible for preventing such a move will be responsible for the unnecessary loss of thousands of lives.” While US forces made short work of Cuba’s Spanish defenders, they hastily retreated in the face of the mosquito’s mauling barrage of malaria and yellow fever. The evacuation of US forces was initiated in mid-August. “Cuba became a U.S. dependency until 1902. Thereafter it was nominally free . . . thanks to yellow fever and malaria,” concludes J. R. McNeill. “Cubans have lionized their heroes. Americans venerated theirs, and elected one, Theodore Roosevelt, to the presidency before carving his likeness on Mt. Rushmore. There are no monuments to mosquitoes, far and away the most lethal foe of the Spanish army in Cuba.” The mosquito also spared Cuba from outright American annexation, instigating nearly a century of hostile relations and harrowing events.

  With mosquito-borne disease hindering any American military occupation, Cuba was given formal independence in 1902 under a puppet government answerable to Washington. Underwriting this token independence were furtive fine-print clauses. Cuba was forbidden to form alliances with other countries, America retained the first right of refusal for all trade, economic portfolios, and infrastructure contracts, maintained the right to militarily intervene at its choosing, and secured perpetual possession of Guantanamo Bay. Under the new American-backed regime, Cuba became a dictatorial banana republic and an American economic and self-indulgent epicurean playground at the expense of the impoverished Cuban people.

  In 1959, socialist revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara put an end to the US-sponsored authoritarian rule and corrupt regime of President Fulgencio Batista, and quickly aligned themselves as a communist satellite of the Soviet Union. President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion using CIA-trained counterrevolutionaries was a disaster. “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” the president remarked while accepting full responsibility for the fiasco. The botched mission drove Cuba further into the Soviet embrace, leading to the near-apocalyptic Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Although cool heads prevailed, and rational dialogue eventually deescalated the possibility of nuclear annihilation, the global population held its breath for thirteen nail-biting days as the planet teetered on the eve of destruction. It took over fifty years for US-Cuban relations to begin to normalize, under President Barack Obama.

  The Spanish-American War, however, was not isolated to Cuba. It seeped across the Pacific to the Spanish colony of the Philippines, where the American Navy crushed its Spanish opponent in Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. American forces simultaneously landed at Puerto Rico, Guam, and Hawaii. Japan, a burgeoning industrial and military power, watched uneasily as America expanded its influence across the Pacific Rim. President McKinley assured the world that despite its imperialistic veneer, “the American Flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire territory but for Humanity’s sake.” The global Spanish-American War officially ended with the American capture of the Philippine capital city, Manila, on August 13, 1898.

  “Hit Him Hard!: President McKinley: “Mosquitoes seem to be worse here in the Philippines than they were in Cuba.” The American invasions of Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War highlighted the perils of foreign imperialistic forays into the tropics. This February 1899 cartoon from Judge magazine mocking President McKinley depicts Cuban and Filipino insurgents as lethal and stubborn mosquitoes. The 1898 American invasion of Cuba, however, also led to the unmasking of the Aedes mosquito as the cause of yellow fever by the US Army Yellow Fever Commission headed by Dr. Walter Reed. (Library of Congress)

  Following the Spanish surrender in the Philippines, President McKinley announced that “there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them.” Instead, American occupation forces initiated their own brutal and barbaric cleansing and “reconcentration” of Filipino civilians, mimicking the counterinsurgency tactics of General Weyler in Cuba. One American general, who was later court-martialed, ordered his men to execute every Filipino male over the age of ten. The media, however, publicly spun President McKinley’s words “that the official mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.”

  During this forgotten Philippine-American War, Filipino revolutionaries, who had been combating Spanish colonial occupation since 1896, fought a guerrilla war against American forces until 1902. They wanted independence from any and all foreign powers. William Taft, governor general of the Philippines and future US president, argued that it would take a century of blood before the Filipinos could be taught to appreciate “what Anglo-Saxon liberty is.” Eventually, reports of American atrocities could no longer be contained or censored. The wid
ely circulated weekly magazine the Nation reported on the not so “splendid” or “little” war that had degenerated “into a war of conquest, characterized by rapine and cruelty worthy of savages.” During its first deployment of troops outside the Western Hemisphere, the United States poured more than 126,000 men into the Philippines.* Of the roughly 4,500 who died, 75% perished from disease, including malaria and dengue. Over the course of the brutal three-year war, the best estimates place the total Filipino death toll at 300,000 as a result of combat, murder, starvation and disease, and the squalor of the concentration camps. The Philippines remained under American (or Japanese) jurisdiction in some form until it was finally granted complete independence in 1946.*

  The Spanish-American War did more than carve out a global American empire. It also led to the unmasking of the mosquito as the vector for yellow fever. When American forces invaded Cuba in 1898, the military men, physicians, and politicians steering the war fully understood the threat posed by yellow fever. Cuba had rightfully earned a notorious reputation as a catacomb for mosquito-borne disease. Given that the mosquito-malaria mystery had been unraveled a year earlier, numerous leading researchers also fingered the mosquito as the merchant of yellow fever. In 1881, Carlos Finlay, a Cuban doctor educated in France and the US, isolated the Aedes mosquito as the vector for yellow fever, though acknowledging at the time that his experiments were inconclusive. The mosquito remained innocent until scientifically proven guilty.

  The American architects of the war dissected the medical reports pouring in from Cuba with great interest and anxiety. They recognized that, as in the past, Cuban mosquitoes could manipulate the destiny of American designs on the island. The task of combating yellow fever, an enemy far more lethal than the Spanish, landed on the shoulders of Dr. Walter Reed.