Thankful for Pesticides

Mosquito fogging trucks and men in suits that look like they were made for space travel surround our apartment complex and pump clouds of mosquito-killing fog into the air. The fog smells as toxic as it is, and when the trucks are coming, we try to either leave the apartment complex first, or else we have to hole ourselves up inside a room with all the windows closed and the cracks under the door stuffed with towels to prevent the poisonous air from leaking in. Mosquito fogging happens once every month or so--more often when dengue cases are reported from our apartment complex.

In a world that's all for being all-natural, it's living in a country where mosquito-borne illnesses are a real and deadly threat that makes me grateful for chemical defense against the insects that are so pervasive here.

Dengue fever was, for me, anyway, once something that I read about on one of the cards in the game Worst Case Scenarios. Now, it's a disease that has affected more than a dozen people I know personally here--a disease that sends healthy adults to the hospital, wracked with pain and fever. Thankfully, it can be treated, but there's no guarantee of living through dengue unscathed.

Dengue isn't the only mosquito-borne illness over here. Thankfully, we don't live in an area where malaria is a problem, but chikungunya, another fever which appears similar to dengue, landed my little sister Rebekah in the hospital for nearly a week about six years ago.

My family has always been very vigilant about mosquito exposure. When we first moved, we slept under mosquito nets. Eventually, my parents opted to pay for screens to be installed on all the windows in our rented home, as that would offer us mosquito protection during the day as well. We made sure never to water our plants too generously, as any standing water turns into an instant breeding ground for mosquitoes here. We laid in a good supply of bug repellents and weren't allowed to go out to the park or other known places where mosquitoes were bad without them. We wore jeans and tennis shoes when hiking in the rainforest to prevent bug bites on our legs. The little girls had to come home from friends' unscreened houses before dark when the bugs got bad.

It's been interesting, using so many strategies to try to prevent mosquito bites--to remember to view them as not just as the causes of itchy little bites, but as insects that can potentially cause very serious disease. The youngest person I've known to be hospitalized for dengue wasn't even 2 years old...the oldest was well over 60. Those mosquitoes don't discriminate, and it's impossible to totally guard against them in this climate. Many people have visible scars left by mosquito bites. I wish we could ask these insects politely to please not bite us, but that doesn't work, so in the meantime, I'm grateful for mosquito fogging trucks.

{This is Day 26 of my 31 Days Series: 31 Days of Growing up in Malaysia}