Mozzie invasion in Gloucestershire

After the wet, then warm, summer, Britain has faced a mosquito explosion. I've never seen so many in the house - reminds me of some tropical exotic place the way they buzz my ears at night - now I can cope with the biggest of spiders, slugs, slow worms, beatles, wasps - indeed whatever but Mozzies no. They do something to me and I can't rest until I catch every last one of them - whatever the time of the night I'm up and out of bed ready to swat - if I know there is one there I will wait them out.

Thankfully times are not what they used to be - Chaucer and Shakespeare are full of references to mosquitos and their related diseases - apparently in Kent and Essex areas when things got really bad, the hostelries created a spectacularly potent opium-laced beer to help.

The Guardian also recounts that during the closing months of the Great War, a Dr Ronald Ross, winner of the 1902 Nobel prize for medicine for finally demonstrating the link between mosquitoes and malaria, diagnosed the disease in British troops he was tending in Greece and recommended they all be packed off home to Blighty to recuperate. Whoever did the packing failed to follow the good doctor's second recommendation, which was that the soldiers should on no account be billeted in any part of Britain where mosquitoes flourished. Since the marshes of north Kent were positively humming with several million potentially malaria-transmitting mozzies, more than 500 locals duly succumbed to the fevers (though none, happily, died of them).

It seems it is not just here in Gloucestershire the blood-sucking whining beasts are over-running homes - the NHS Direct reports nationwide that phone calls from people inquiring about mosquito bites have soared. Of course things are likely to get worse....

Tony Irwin, curator of natural history at the Castle museum in Norwich and an acknowledged expert on Norfolk's fenland and Broads mosquitoes has said: "It depends how the climate actually changes, but if we are going to be having more wet, warm summers, more pools of stagnant water, that will favour breeding conditions, no question. Likewise, if our winters are going to continue to get milder, then more mosquitoes will survive to breed the following year. The weather could be coming round to favour mosquitoes in a big way, and if we have more mosquitoes, we can probably expect an increase in the diseases they carry."

Apparently there are up to 33 species of mosquito currently indigenous to Britain, 20 of which bite and just five of which are potential transmitters of malaria. Indeed malaria remains one of the world's deadliest diseases, affecting up to 650 million people every year and killing between one and three million, mostly young children. There is no vaccine currently available, and the preventative drugs that must be taken continuously to ward it off - as well as the treatments to cure it - are beyond the budget of almost everyone who lives in the afflicted areas - and I have to say can have nasty side-effects as well as personal experience will attest to.

In the UK with the exception of up to 2,000 cases each year brought back by returning travellers, the disease has been eradicated, thanks partly to aggressive marshland draining and larvae-clearing operations in the past century, but mainly to the fortunate fact that mosquitoes are not actually born with malaria. So with climate change could Britain once again become malarial? In recent years Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan have all seen the return of malaria.

Certainly species that are not native could start breeding here - some also carry other nice diseases like Dengue fever, encephalitis and yellow fever. However at present it seems doctors are confident they can stop them getting a hold here - having said that I read 'Plague's Progress' a while ago and I'm less sure after the arguments in that book....

How to avoid getting bitten - some thoughts from Guardian article

- Heat some citronella oil, if you're sitting outside.
- Eat lots of garlic and take a vitamin B complex works too
- they hate the yeasty smell which is why some recommend eating Marmite
- Soothe the bites by rubbing a little lavender oil on them.
- Crush the leaves of elder trees or yarrow
- Sleep with a mosquito net - Sit in windy areas
- Peat fires
- Mush up big tobacco leaves in water and then rub it on