bugging out in melaque

Somewhere some modern Pharaoh (I suspect Hugo Chávez) is holding Chosen People captive.


My request: Let them go. My legs and arms can't take any more.


This past week we have had a visitation of mosquitoes.


No. Visitation is not the word. That sounds like respectable ladies in white gloves and haute couture hats making their rounds in The Hamptons.


Infestation is more like it. Genesis plague material.


My small fishing village by the sea has always had more than its share of biting-stinging insects. Every paradise comes equipped with its own serpent. The cost for admission in Melaque is the occasional bite from some unidentified bug.


Now that I have become a regular sea bather, a bite now and then was worth the joy of life by the sea.


But, as the Monty Python troupe would remind us: "And now for something different." Well, not so different. Just more.


This past week the mosquitoes have been out in force in their death squadrons. As if they know their wintery death draws nigh.


Monday night is a good example. I had dinner with a neighbor at an open-air restaurant near my new house. Due to bites earlier in the week, I slathered myself with DEET 100 -- the NOB variety unavailable in Mexico. The owner had also taken the precaution to set out coils of burning citronella to ward off the mosquitoes.


It worked no better than the Maginot Line. The mosquitoes had their way with both of us. And I think it is the first time I have ever seen mosquitoes bold enough to land on food to rest. Maybe they have an undiscovered affinity for quesadillas de camarón.


Even my house offers a great buffet for mosquitoes. Wherever I am, mosquitoes find me. Reading on the couch. Cooking dinner. In bed. Chicken pox could not look less attractive on me than my current collection of mosquito scars.


Mosquito bites heal. However, a portion of the mosquitoes around here belong to Aedes aegypti -- pictured above. Easily identified by those white knees. Like some mini-skate board dude.


The name should sound familiar. We all heard it in grade school. It is the mosquito that almost stopped the Panama Canal. Its bite is not the problem. What it carries in its gut is. This is the prime carrier of yellow fever.


Thanks to William Gorgas, Walter Reed, and Carlos Finlay, we now have a vaccine to protect us from yellow fever. I recently had a booster.


But Aedes aegypti carries another virus, as well -- dengue fever. Melaque is currently awash in dengue. In comes in four varieties -- the nastiest is a hemorrhagic variety with a high mortality rate.


The common variety, however, is usually not deadly. You just wish you could die. What you get is fever, bladder problems, constant headaches, eye pain, severe dizziness, and a complete loss of appetite.


Oh, yes. When you move, the pain is so bad in your joints that it feels as if your bones are breaking. Thus, its common name: "bonebreak fever."


For me, concern over dengue fever is right up there with the fear of being eaten by piranha in my bath tub. But it would be a real pain to get it while I plan a trip to Oregon for Christmas.


So, wherever that Pharaoh is, I will put in my request, again: Let those people go -- wherever they are.


And just skip the plague of biting flies. We've already had them.