Health Tips-27: "Mosquito Menace"

A friend of mine likened mosquito to God, because it is also omnipresent and All-Powerful like God. Joking apart, mosquito is a real menace.

Spoiling your sleep, making you scratch the bitten spot, infecting you with serious diseases like malaria, dengue,chikungunya and brain fever.

We try everything that we can think of to get rid of the menace: mosquito coils, mosquito nets, sprays containing mosquito repellents etc. In the process, we have started poisoning ourselves with toxic chemicals like allethrin, which is commonly used in mosquito coils. We even close all windows, doors and every other hole through which it can come. We block all paths of ventilation and are ready to suffocate ourselves to death rather than be bitten by mosquitos. Still all our efforts fail and we despair not knowing what to do.

On occasions, I have taken 'Ledum Palustre', a homeopathy medicine in low and medium potencies for mosquito bites with definite relief.

My nephew, Aravind, never fails to light a stick of "dasangam" to stop mosquitoes from entering the house. To some extent, it stops them; an added benefit of this is the pleasant smell that emanates from the fumes. I have read somewhere "dasangam" and "agar bathis" (generally incense sticks) have a positive effect on the mind.

Mosquito repellents is big business now. In every home you find people using some sort of mosquito repellent or the other. As everybody knows, mosquitoes thrive and multiply where water stagnates, whether it is rain water or water from the gutters. Our civic bodies whose top most priority should be sanitation do not have time or money to maintain it. They spend public money to put up hoardings everywhere of their leaders or of themselves, which are no use to the general public and a clear misuse of public funds.

I have come across these interesting, useful and very practical articles in "THE WHY FILES" entitled, "Mosquito Bytes", "Protecting yourself from the flying nightmare", "Trivial facts about a non-trivial insect" and "Why do mosquitoes bite me more than my friends?". I feel it would be of interest to everybody. I am giving below their links, in case you want to read these articles:
http://whyfiles.org/016skeeter/index.html
http://whyfiles.org/016skeeter/7.html
http://whyfiles.org/016skeeter/8.html
http://whyfiles.org/071questions/7.html

For a detailed article on "MOSQUITO" from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito

If you have any additional material, you are most welcome to share them with me and other readers of this blog. Thank you.

Grateful thanks to Terry Devitt, S.V.Medaris, David Tenenbaum and Amy Toburen of The Why Files and Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.