MOSQUITO 



3967 



MOSQUITO 



generations are possible during the course of a 

 long, wet summer. 



The Mosquito that Carries Malaria. It is 

 only since about 1898 that all the evidence has 

 been gathered that has laid the responsibility 

 for spreading malarial and other fevers at the 

 door of the tropical mosquito with spotted 

 wings, called Anopheles. This name comes 

 from a Greek word meaning hurtful, but an 

 equivalent for "murderous" would not be an 

 exaggeration. Its bill has but one needle, yet 

 with that one it does a thousand times more 

 harm than the Culcx with 



The Romans gave the name malaria (bad 

 air) to the fever that carried off their people 



(a) Adult male Anopheles mosquito; (b) 

 female Anopheles; (c) female, Culex. 



by the thousands, because they believed it was 

 caused by the poisonous vapors arising from 

 the swamps and marshes that composed the 

 great plain around Rome known as the Cam- 

 pagna. The night air was considered par- 

 ticularly dangerous; and doubtless in this an-, 

 cient error may be found at least one source 

 of the objection many people still have to 

 sleeping with open windows. Physicians and 

 naturalists, however, have proved that marshes 

 are malarial simply because they offer a favor- 

 able breeding place for mosquitoes, and that 

 tin ninht air is dangerous only because the 

 malarial mosquito chooses th nighttime to go 

 food hunting. 



Through countless experiments it was learned 

 that when a mosquito has sucked into its mouth 



Mood of a person suffering from malaria, 

 the saliva which it injects into the next person 

 bitten will pass on the little parasite which is 



ircrm of malaria. This much having been 

 established, careful tests were then made to 

 bite of the malarial mosquito is 

 the only agency by which the malaria germ is 

 transmitted. One such experiment was made 

 in 1900, when two English physicians built a 

 mosquito-proof house in the heart of the Ro- 

 man Campagna and lived there through the 

 rainy season. Since the mosquito seeks its food 



at night, they went indoors each evening at six 

 o'clock, and although they took no other pre- 

 caution neither contracted the disease. A fur- 

 ther interesting experiment along these lines 

 was carried out by sending a malaria-infected 

 mosquito all the way from Rome to London 

 and allowing it to bite a perfectly healthy sub- 

 ject, who was duly taken ill with the fever. 

 Other similar experiments have been made, 

 many of them in Cuba, Panama and Hawaii. 

 Each one has only proved more conclusively 

 than before that if all the mosquitoes in the 

 world could be killed off, from egg to adult, 

 there would soon be no more malaria. 



The way to distinguish the malarial mosquito 

 from other members of the mosquito family is 

 by the fact that its larvae (young) remain at 

 the surface of the water, and by the spotted 

 wings and resting, position of the adult insect. 

 With head, body and tail in a straight line, it 

 makes an angle with the surface on which it is 

 resting; whereas in the other varieties the in- 

 sect rests in a humpbacked position, with its 

 abdomen parallel to the surface of support. It 

 does not lay its eggs so promiscuously as the 



At left, the Culex mosquito; at right, Anopheles 

 mosquito. The latter always assumes the position 

 shown when preparing? to bite. 



common mosquito, but chooses permanent 

 pools or marshes. From this habit has come 

 its popular name of swamp mosquito. 



The Yellow-Fever Mosquito. To the scien- 

 tists of America belongs the credit for trying 

 and convicting the mosquito of the criminal act 

 of transmitting yellow fever. The variety that 

 carries this often fatal disease is the attnu 

 silver-banded Stcgomyia calopus, also called 

 Stcgomyia fasciata (Greek, meaning fly with 

 striped legs). In 1900. while the American 

 army was occupying Cuba nftrr tin war with 

 Spain, a commission was appointed under Dr. 

 Sternberg, surgeon-general of the United States 

 army, to work on the yellow-fever problem in 

 Havana. Tests were made with the inmates 

 of two specially-built rooms. One room was a 

 model of hygienic system, but mosquitoes 

 which had bitten yellow fever sufferers were 

 admitted, and six out of the seven patients con- 



