The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator

by Timothy C. Winegard

Last year she slaughtered only 830,000 people. We sensible and wise Homo sapiens occupied the runner-up #2 spot, slaying 580,000 of our own species.

Since 2000, the annual average number of human deaths caused by the mosquito has hovered around 2 million.

The mosquito has killed more people than any other cause of death in human history. Statistical extrapolation situates mosquito-inflicted deaths approaching half of all humans that have ever lived. In plain numbers, the mosquito has dispatched an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion throughout our relatively brief 200,000-year existence.*

Blood type O seems to be the vintage of choice over types A and B or their blend. People with blood type O get bitten twice as often as those with type A, with type B falling somewhere in between.

The human body contains one hundred times as many bacterial cells as it does human cells.

Ravenous mosquito swarms literally bleed young caribou to death at a bite rate of 9,000 per minute, or by way of comparison, they can drain half the blood from an adult human in just two hours!

Insects remain the most prolific and diverse catalogue of creatures on our planet, accounting for 57% of all living organisms, and an astounding 76% of all animal life.

Contrary to popular belief, the mosquito does not even serve as an indispensable food source for any other animal. She has no purpose other than to propagate her species and perhaps to kill humans. As the apex predator throughout our odyssey, it appears that her role in our relationship is to act as a countermeasure against uncontrolled human population growth.

Mosquito-borne pathogens can be separated into three groupings: viruses, worms, and protozoans (parasites).

in 1502, Las Casas asserted that Indians, including the Taino, were “truly men” and must not “be treated as dumb beasts,” and he petitioned the Spanish Crown for their humane management. “The entire human race is one,” he proclaimed, while entreating that Indians receive “all guarantees of liberty and justice. Nothing is certainly more precious in human affairs, nothing more esteemed than freedom.”

it turns out that not all men are created equal after all, for African slaves were considered chattel and property, not persons, even by this Spanish priest who at the same time was passionately endorsing the virtue of personhood for the enslaved indigenous populations of the Americas.

At the same time that Las Casas was demanding a gentle hand for the Taino, he was also championing the importation of African slaves, arguing that they were more constitutionally fit for tropical labor, in part due to their “thick skin” and “offensive odors from their persons.” He boasted that in the Spanish colonies checkering the Caribbean, “the only way a black would die would be if they hanged him.” The fate of Spanish fortune in the Americas, he surmised, hinged on the importation of African slave labor.

African transport slavery only became a profitable replacement after local indigenous servitude was no longer an option.

Their genetic immunities and prior seasoning made Africans an important ingredient of the Columbian Exchange and indispensable in the development of New World mercantilist economic markets.

At the height of the slave trade in the mid-eighteenth century, the French and English were each importing over 40,000 slaves a year. This uptick in tempo of African slavery in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was directly tied to the mosquito.

The name John Smith is synonymous with the lore of the founding of Jamestown and the misrepresented frontier glamour of America. As it turns out, he was really just a shameless self-promoter. Smith was the architect of so much disinformation, personal propaganda, and outright deceit that it is hard to take his five autobiographies, published in less than eighteen years, seriously.

Although Jamestown teetered on the precipice of disaster, unlike previous English attempts at colonization, including the legendary Lost Colony of Roanoke, it managed to survive, thanks to tobacco and, eventually, African slavery. It was not John Smith, but rather John Rolfe, who in 1610 planted the seeds for the United States of America. Tobacco seeds, that is.

that would breathe life into British America, originally filtered through Jamestown. Unwittingly, by cultivating tobacco, the British colonists also summoned mosquito-borne death.

Columbian Exchange. Their colonies in the Americas,

Kicked out of the Caribbean by mercenary mosquitoes, the French initiated modern innovations in industry and agriculture. French botanists, for example, replaced the loss of Caribbean cane sugar by extracting sweetener from European sugar beets.

New Orleans, the heart of Dixie trade, was captured a year into the war in April 1862, followed by Memphis a month later, effectively damming the Mississippi River and choking the flow of blockade runners and Confederate supplies. In doing so, the Union also inadvertently closed river access to yellow fever, saving the occupying forces from the nightmare of disease and death that historically engulfed New Orleans and the Mississippi delta. Confederate planners fully expected New Orleans to be a headache for the Union.

As it turned out, yellow fever was scarce during the war, especially in New Orleans, where it killed only eleven residents. The Union occupation force maintained stringent sanitation measures and a strict quarantine. During the Civil War, only 1,355 cases and 436 deaths were reported among Union troops. As the Anaconda Plan tightened its stranglehold on the South, yellow fever became increasingly less likely.

Kentucky physician and leading expert on yellow fever Dr. Luke Blackburn was too old to enlist. But as a Confederate zealot, he was determined to serve the southern cause. He hatched a maniacal plan to defeat the Union by unleashing a biblical plague of yellow fever on the District of Columbia, killing Lincoln in the process. Learning of a nasty black vomit epidemic stalking Bermuda, which was also a haven for Confederate blockade runners, in April 1864, he made passage to the island. Upon arrival, Dr. Blackburn proceeded to fill several trunks with soiled garments and bedding from yellow fever victims.

Unfortunately, Africa bears the brunt of this disease overlap, accounting for 85% of new malarial infections and 50% of new HIV infections. Malaria increases the viral replication of HIV, while HIV, by weakening the immune system, makes carriers more susceptible to malaria.