Re: This mosquito is good at hiding

[Aardvark]

> It's probably bed bugs.

>> the female mosquito only bites the once. >> > how does it transmit malaria then?

By biting, of course. At least twice.

[Phil L]

There's a spray available from most places - shops, supermarkets and even garages sell it, it's called 'fly spray', apparently it kills flies, but only when you spray it in the room they are in.

HTH

[james]

In message , john hamilton writes

Arun District Council have tried banning Mosquitoes. JF

Cross-posts reduced to the Usenet-compliant 4 newsgroups to make this post acceptable.

[Gib Bogle]

Stickiness.

[geoff]

In message , Aardvark writes

That's all we need - mosquitos with a mouthfull of molars

[Clot]

Wow! Have you seen the proboscis on her!

[Gib Bogle]

What we call sandflies, which I think are also known as blackflies, are worse than mozzies because they hurt more. Mozzies are more surreptitious, somehow managing to insert their sucking tube without you noticing. The worst thing about them at night is that damnable whine. If they were quiet I wouldn't care much, since I don't get an itchy lump.

[Gib Bogle]

The NZ variety do that, IIRC, but there's no malaria here.

[Gib Bogle]

If you stay awake for a while after turning out the light you'll hear a mozzie for sure. If you hear nothing it's not a mozzie.

[Dave Liquorice]

There is no malaria here either at least not in the general human/mozzie population. I think there have been a few very isolated cases of transfer of malaria from some one bringing it back with them from climes foreign to some one in the same household.

[Gib Bogle]

Whenever I see your name I think of liquorice papers, for some reason.

[Spamlet]

--

Malaria did used to be common in the UK and there are stories of men from the marshes having had to have many wives as they tended to die fairly quickly after being taken home. The environment agency is busily surveying on the marshes - as seen on recent tv prog - and mincing up mossies by the hundred looking for signs of malarial DNA. With so much air travel it is only a matter of time before malaria gets back into our mossies. On the other hand, in the US they have started releasing mossies in which malaria cannot survive...

A friend who used to write some of the Rough Guides, had malaria, and when it flared up, he had a job to convince the local hospital to believe him: think what it would be like for someone who hadn't actually written about how to avoid travellers' diseases and was in regular contact with the London School of Tropical Medicine! An ordinary person is likely to go undiagnosed for quite long enough to get bitten by a home grown mossie...

S

[Dave Liquorice]

Was known as the Ague IIRC.

Quite probably, but our climate is borderline for it. Might be a problem down south but I'm not sure it (or the adult mozzies) can over winter further north.

Quite, this story is rather worrying:

problem is it can stay low for such a long time after infection with the parasite. All the same the repeated diagnosis of flu isn't right, first time maybe but not second time even within a couple of months flu just isn't that common. That should have raised a "hum, there is something different here" flag and further questioning, tests etc performed.

[tony sayer]

Theres the problem with "Flu like" symptoms. A friends wife phoned up the doctors in the evening a few of years ago as she thought she had something else in addition the aches and pains of typical Flu and was told 2 x Paracetamol 3 times a day etc..

That following morning she got up with an extreme headache made her way downstairs and then collapsed. Fortunately Mrs nosey neighbour across the way had an item of their post delivered to her and just "happened" to have a look thru a windowpane and saw her there collapsed.

They were pumping antibiotics into her on the way to hospital and that wasn't that far away. Just lost most of her toes and a few fingers to gangrene.

Meningitis strikes very quickly.

Almost a punch line to this sorry tale;!..

Her profession?..

A Hospital Nurse;!.......

And to add to that one of our sprogs some years ago .. they called from school to say she was very unwell and described Headaches, stiff neck, vomiting, aversion to light, seeming spaced out and not with it .. Told the wife to take her to the A&E dept at the hospital right away got there barged in front of the queue said we had a child with symptoms of the above affliction, seen right away but a docs who said that we did the right thing and they were about to take blood tests and then 10 mins later she just wanted to go home and felt fine:)

Felt like a right chump but all in the A&E said thats fine, we did what they would have done if it was a child of theirs!...

[Huge]

I think A&E would rather people came in, if they think they have something serious. A couple of years ago, I thought I was having a heart attack - palpitations, pain from the chest radiating into the shoulder, tachycardia (rapid heart beat). We rushed down to A&E and they rushed me straight past the queue and into a cubicle (the nurse *ran* down the corridor in front of me to get a bed/ECG ready). They wired me to an ECG, and everything came up flashing red, blood pressure, heart rate, WHY.

After about 40 minutes, we realised that I had indigestion and had probably pulled a muscle in my shoulder. The rest was panic. They made me a cup of tea. I kept apologising but they said that they'd much rather people with "chest" pains came in and it proved to be indigestion than they stayed at home and died of heart attacks ...

[tony sayer]

Yep I had bad ankle swelling which is a distinct symptom of heart failure, doc seemed rather concerned and ordered up an Echocardiogram .. come the dreaded day;..

Nurse practitioner who was doing it had a couple of "return to nursing" ladies with her and was paying far more attention to her colleagues. I just seemed to be a bystander in the procedure...

Did an ECG and told them "there you can put that in a medical textbook as absolutely how it ought to look" then with her new machine better then anything that went before, pronounced "here we have a hart in fine condition with no enlargement and murmur" all of which I'm supposed to have had...

And finally she just said, all done you can go, and packed up her machine leaving me rather bemused..

Asked her, so no failure then and what was causing the swelling?..

Just reduce your blood pressure meds a little said she.. which oddly enough cleared that quite well.......

[andrew]

In the early 50s our wet heath was "fogged" with insecticide (we used to see how close we could get to the land rover by creeping up in the fog), at the time my mother said they were killing the gnats. My father was one of the servicemen that returned from Burma, without any apparent infection but in retrospect I guess there must have been a significant reservoir of the disease in the returning servicemen.

Later the accountant at work in 76 returned with malaria, from Zimbabwe, he used to sit huddled in a blanket, sweating and drinking whisky-milk cocktail till it subsided.

AJH

[Gib Bogle]

I've had it. No fun at all.