The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  Charles Darwin stated in his seminal 1859 treatise, On the Origin of Species, “Natural selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.” I suppose CRISPR is natural selection by other means, although I am not sure Mr. Darwin would necessarily agree. As drugs and insecticides fail in the face of our vampiric predator, with the silver bullets of malaria vaccines and CRISPR, it appears as though we are approaching the decisive Armageddon battle in our eternal war with mosquitoes.

  Now that we can tamper with the mosquito’s genome, we finally have the chance to strike back, but there are historical lessons to be mindful of and to heed. As we have seen with DDT, it is never quite that simple. The fate of our species has been tied to that of the mosquito throughout our wild coevolutionary ride from our first clumsy encounters in Africa to Ryan Clark’s sickle cells and NFL Super Bowls. We did not get to choose our own adventure. For better or for worse, our destinies and interactive histories have been forever entwined, trapped in a single story of struggle and survival with ultimately the same outcome. We would be naive to think that we can effortlessly and without a catch disentangle them now. After all, in the end, we are both still here.

  Conclusion

  We are still at war with the mosquito.

  Dr. Rubert Boyce, founder of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, bluntly stated in 1909 that the fate of human civilization would be decided by one simple equation: “Mosquito or Man?” This has been the most important survival question asked by both our modern species and our hominid ancestors. In fact, this question was so crucial for the propagation of early Homo sapiens that the mosquito mandated and drove modifications to the genetic sequencing of our DNA. Through natural human selection, hereditary malarial defenses materialized and evolved to meet her lethal bite. With CRISPR gene-editing technology, we now aim to return the favor.

  She has ruled the earth for 190 million years and has killed with unremitting potency for most of her unrivaled reign of terror. This tiny but tenacious insect has punched well above its weight class with unmitigated fury and ferocity. Across the ages, she has imposed her will on humanity and has dictated the course of history. The mosquito was the instigator of events, nurturing and mothering the creation of the modern global order. She has consumed virtually every corner of our planet, devoured a vast array of animals, including the dinosaurs, while collecting the corpses of an estimated 52 billion people for good measure.

  The mosquito sponsored both the rise and fall of ancient empires, she gave birth to independent nations while callously subduing and subjugating others. She has crippled and even destroyed economies. She has prowled the most momentous and pivotal battles, menaced and slaughtered the greatest armies of her generations, and outmaneuvered the most celebrated generals and military minds ever mustered to arms, slaying many of these men in the course of her carnage. Throughout our history of violence, Generals Anopheles and Aedes were powerful weapons of war, moonlighting as formidable foes or avaricious allies.

  Although in recent years we have somewhat dampened her onslaught, she continues to inject her influence on human populations. As natural global warming, hastened by greenhouse gas emissions, consumes our planet, she is expanding the battlefield by opening new fronts and penetrating areas of operation formerly free of her mosquito-borne diseases. Her reach is growing, expanding both north and south and vertically into higher altitudes as previously untapped regions warm up to her presence. Stalwart mosquito-borne diseases maintain a steadfast evolutionary commitment to survival and pose a mounting threat to progressively mobile and mingling human populations. Even in the face of modern science and medicine, she remains the most hazardous animal to humankind.

  Last year she killed only 830,000 people, but still far outpaced our butchery of our own kind. Recently, our own battle-hardened mosquito warriors, scientific arms dealers, and medical lords of war have added new sophisticated weapons of mass destruction to our arsenal in the form of CRISPR gene extinction drives and malaria vaccinations. We are deploying these ordnances to the most active front lines of the operational battlefield to meet her surging threat, courtesy of her adroit new munitions such as Zika and West Nile, and the upgrading of her historically dependable and seasoned soldiers, including malaria and dengue. In this total war with our deadliest predator, there can be only one outcome—the unconditional surrender of the mosquito and her diseases. There is perhaps only one way to achieve this end state—the utter destruction and extermination of the mosquito and her diseases.

  Wiping 110 trillion enemy mosquitoes and their pathogens from the face of the earth would substitute the current continuum of human history, which she painstakingly helped to create, with another divergent reality having unknown repercussions. She would nevertheless still be making history, although it would be her last entry into the archives of humankind. CRISPR may very well write the epilogue to her extraordinary story.

  As we have seen throughout history, however, the mosquito has survived the best and worst that nature and humankind have thrown her way, to kill across time with unsurpassed intensity. She outlived the extinction-level event of the dinosaurs and has repeatedly shape-shifted to frustrate all our labors of extermination. Across our existence she has determined the fates of nations, decided momentous wars, and helped design our global arrangement, killing nearly half of humanity along the way. CRISPR, like DDT and other tools of execution, however, may also succumb to her evolving bite. History has shown her to be a dogged survivor. For now, the indefatigable mosquito remains our deadliest predator.

  Granted, I sympathize that for most readers, it is understandably challenging to emotionally connect with or attach a human face to the mind-boggling statistics and loss of life surveyed in this book. We have seen the mosquito wreak havoc on humankind since the dawn of our species and kill or pollute a wide swath of populations throughout this bloody journey. For most of this epic adventure we have toured through the past, on a voyage across the ages of antiquity, visited the renowned sites and heroic battlefields of ancient empires and aspiring nations, and flipped through the earmarked pages and highlighted tales of history. The mosquito and her diseases, however, are still feverishly hard at work, writing fresh entries to our human odyssey.

  While many of you might live in regions currently pardoned or uninhabited by mosquito-borne disease, if you have read this book, it should come as no surprise that the mosquito still touches the lives of hundreds of millions of people and not just with her infuriating hum-buzz or her irritating yet unreachable itch. Just a hunch, but my guess is, if you ask around, a familiar face might answer with a yes or a nod to dengue, malaria, West Nile, Zika, or, alternatively, be a carrier of a genetic shield such as sickle cell.

  Given that my adopted home of Grand Junction, Colorado, is situated in West Nile alley, numerous colleagues and students at Colorado Mesa University, where I teach, have contracted the disease, some with permanent paralysis and disability. They were infected right in their own backyards, on the surrounding hiking and biking trails, or while rafting or fishing on the Colorado and Gunnison Rivers, which snake through the core of the city that serves as the “grand junction” for the two waterways. I also know of students, friends, and acquaintances who have suffered through the breakbone fevers of malaria and dengue while traveling or volunteering as aid workers. One student described his bout of dengue while backpacking in Cambodia as a two-week vacation in hell. Aside from the vomiting, hallucinatory fevers, and rash, he said that the agonizing pain he experienced “felt like someone was slowly tapping nails into my bones and gradually squeezing my joints and muscles with vise grips.” Many soldiers and veterans that I spoke with contracted malaria or dengue during exotic military deployments or when operating as private military contractors (PMC) in Africa. Recently, a mate of mine, who now works as a PMC, called me up from Mali while be
dridden with malaria. I also know two people who are carriers of sickle cell trait. While I have experienced vibrant mefloquine-induced kaleidoscope-fantasia dreams, thankfully, I have never contracted a mosquito-borne disease that I know of. I do, however, owe my life, my very being, to an African Anopheles mosquito that fought in the First World War.

  For the first time in his life, my fifteen-year-old great-grandpa, William Winegard, left his sleepy Canadian hometown in 1915 to enlist in the army. The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 awakened his dreams of glory in service of king and country. These chivalrous illusions perished in the industrialized slaughterhouse trenches of the Western Front. In March 1916, William was shot and gassed near Ypres, Belgium. Following hospital convalescence, he was discharged back to Canada for being underage. William never made it back to his idyllically youthful picture-postcard hometown. Disembarking at Montreal, he immediately joined the Canadian Navy, untruthful once more about his age.

  The Many Faces of Malaria: Private/Seaman William Winegard was one of 1.5 million soldiers to contract malaria during the First World War. Thankfully for me, unlike 95,000 others, he survived. Here, a sixteen-year-old William poses upon his enlistment into the Canadian Navy in August 1916 after his time (and wounds) as a soldier on the Western Front. (Winegard Family)

  William served out the remainder of the war on a minesweeper patrolling the West Central African coast, the ancestral birthplace of mosquito-borne disease. In the summer of 1918, he simultaneously contracted “Spanish Influenza,” typhoid, and vivax malaria. By the time the ship’s medic pronounced him dead and was preparing to toss his corpse overboard, William, a once robust five-feet-ten, 175-pound teenager, weighed a skeletal 97 pounds. As fate would have it, a crewmate saw him blink and he was spared the watery grave of Davy Jones’s locker. Like my wife’s grandfather, Sergeant Rex Raney, my great-grandfather William also survived his wartime malarial ordeal. After a year in sick bay in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and another year hospitalized in England, he arrived home to Canada in 1920. Almost six years had passed since William left for war. He would again serve in the Canadian Navy during the Second World War and live to the ripe old age of eighty-seven.

  As a kid, I would sit and listen with reverence and wonderment as he stoically narrated his war stories, including his battles with malaria. He accepted his relapsing malaria as standard seasoning, but stubbornly insisted on blaming the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, rather than the mosquito. Despite sharing his given name with the German monarch, my great-grandpa William’s preferred throwaway line was “Curse Kaiser Bill!” I owe my very existence to that one famished African Anopheles mosquito that fed on him during the war-ravaged summer of 1918. This malarious mosquito and his hydra-headed siren of sickness delayed his repatriation to Canada by almost two years. On his 1920 voyage home, he approached a seasick teenage girl vomiting over the railing and tossed a few snide flirting remarks her way. She lifted her head and, as my great-grandma Hilda told me, she “gave him a tongue-lashing.” The quarreling lovers were happily married for sixty-seven years. Yet, mosquito-borne diseases are not a thing of the past or a bygone relic that afflicted only our ancestors. They are still alive and well.

  Upon the completion of this epic journey and wild ride, my view and opinion of the mosquito were forever changed. Perhaps your attitude toward the mosquito has also adapted, evolved, or been altered in some way from the common genuine hatred expressed in the introduction of this book. My judgment of her now vacillates between that sincere, loathing revulsion and a genuine respect and admiration. Maybe it can be both. After all, within the ongoing war of our world and the natural law of the jungle, she is no different than we are. Just like us, she is simply trying to survive.

  Acknowledgments

  Upon the completion of my fourth book, as customary, my dad and I sat down to brainstorm ideas for a follow-up. Although he is an emergency physician, he really should have been an historian. After gently interrupting to tell me to slow down, he simply said, “Disease!” While I was not wholly convinced by his one-word answer, as usual my dad had narrowed my path, and I was now working off a smaller map. With his simple clue of “disease,” this book was born, and I began my dogged pursuit of our deadliest predator.

  For history geeks like me, this was the ultimate treasure hunt. I could not chart the unknown wilds in search of El Dorado or Cibola like a marauding Spanish conquistador or Nicolas Cage, for that matter, or trek to uncover the Lost City of Z. Nor could I embark on a quest for a Da Vinci Code Holy Grail like Robert Langdon, track down the Templar Treasure, emulate any of Indiana Jones’s epic adventures, or make the hyperspace Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. But, perhaps, I could solve this mystery.

  I scoured my bookshelves and grabbed the required student textbooks I assign for my university classes. My multitool teaching portfolio bridges a broad range of topics and spans a wide swath of intersecting themes: American history; indigenous studies; comparative politics; war and politics of petroleum; and the catchall Western civilizations. The books were filled with gallant tales of great battles, decisive wars, and the rise and fall of glorious ancient civilizations, including Egypt, Greece, and Rome. They all recount the genesis and sociocultural explosion of Christianity and Islam. The narratives extoll the genius of influential military leaders such as Alexander the Great, Hannibal and Scipio, Genghis Khan, George Washington, Napoleon, Tecumseh, and Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. They chart the course of explorers, pirates, and characters of colonization, including Columbus, Cortes, Raleigh, Rolfe, and our cartoon Hollywood princess, Pocahontas. The textbooks all seek to explain the evolution of civilization and how our global order came to pass.

  This simple notion of how our world of yesterdays fashioned and shaped our todays and tomorrows got me thinking. What and who were the major catalysts of change from our past that shaped our present and future? I judged all the usual suspects of trade, politics, religion, imperial European intrusion, slavery, and war. After scanning everything and everyone in my mental rolodex, I concluded that there was still something missing. When I closed the last book, the answer remained elusive, but my curiosity and the word “disease,” which by this time was dominating my thoughts and academic attention, had taken me further down the rabbit hole.

  There was, of course, the infamous Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, wrought by the deadly Yersinia pestis bacterium transmitted by fleas on rats, which wiped out 50% of the European population (tallying a global butcher’s bill of 200 million). I also knew that of the roughly 100 million indigenous people inhabiting the Western Hemisphere, 95% would be exterminated by a cocktail of disease during successive waves of European colonization kicked off by Columbus in 1492 and the ensuing transference of global ecosystems during the “Columbian Exchange.” I was aware of the episodic cholera and typhoid outbreaks of Europe and the American colonies, and the devastating “Spanish Influenza” outbreak of 1918–1919, which killed 75 to 100 million people, five times more than the world war that helped it go viral. These well-known epidemics and their historical repercussions had already been declassified and brought me no closer to my objective. I would ultimately find my prize in the most unlikely of places.

  I enjoy doing groceries. I know, it’s bizarre, but I find it relaxing. Some people meditate or do yoga. I do groceries. On one outing, shortly after the banter about disease with my dad and browsing through all those books, I wandered the aisles, taking in the astonishing assortment of products. I read the labels and marveled at the fact that I had a selection and choice between 26 different forms of canned tomatoes, 19 different blends or roasts of tinned coffee, 57 varieties of ketchup, and 31 allegedly delicious flavors of food for my dog, Steven. I pushed my cart through the global village of groceries, bumping into produce and sundries from every pocket of our planet. I thought to myself that indeed the world is now a small place and that we are the preeminent species. After p
lacing a bag of Ruffles All Dressed chips in my shopping cart, I looked up. There, standing in front of me, hidden in plain sight, was my answer. My treasure, at last, was emblazoned on a giant billboard in a Safeway in my adopted home of Grand Junction, Colorado.

  I read the advertisement again. DEEP WOODS OFF!: REPELS MOSQUITOES THAT MAY CARRY ZIKA, DENGUE OR WEST NILE VIRUS. I shook my head in disbelief and personal displeasure that I had not connected the dots earlier. The topic of my next book, the one that you presently hold in your hand, was now a no-brainer—the mosquito. Nowhere in any of those academic textbooks was there an acknowledgment of her preeminent influence throughout history and her inescapable impact in shaping our human story. At last, I had found my El Dorado. I was determined to set the record straight. This book is the culmination of my treasure hunt.

  While catching up with historian Dr. Tim Cook at the Canadian War Museum roughly a year after that fateful grocery shopping run (and devouring that bag of All Dressed chips), I told him about this book idea and of my vast collection of ongoing research. Tim immediately introduced me to his, and now my, agent, Rick Broadhead. Thank you, Tim, for making that quick phone call and, more importantly, for your support and friendship over the years. Rick, you have been with me since the first steps of this adventure and I am so very grateful to have you in my corner. You, my friend, are simply incredible and I cannot thank you enough for all you do. Having finally completed the manuscript in between teaching and coaching the hockey team (I am Canadian, after all) at Colorado Mesa University, I submitted the draft to my editors, John Parsley, Nicholas Garrison, and Cassidy Sachs at Penguin Random House. Thank you all for your keen eyes, stamina, and guidance during the revision and editing stages. Your feedback and dissections were invaluable.