Review: The mosquito isn’t just annoying — Timothy C. Winegard says we’re at war - Los Angeles Times"...The mosquito is no mere backyard annoyance to be swatted away.
...He contends that the Magna Carta was ultimately signed because Westerners couldn’t survive the mosquitoes in the Mediterranean.
European slave traders came to prefer Africans because of their immunity to the mosquito-borne diseases plaguing the New World.
And those two vanished settlements in the swampy American South, Jamestown and Roanoke?
I’m sure you can guess what Winegard blames for their demise.
While the mosquito was changing human history, it also was changing some human bodies too.
...Seventy percent of the NFL’s players are African American and therefore potential carriers of the sickle-cell trait.
This genetic mutation, which turns round red blood cells into a crescent (or sickle) shape, first affected farmers on the Niger River delta nearly 8,000 years ago as a defense against mosquitoes. (Parasites harboring a brutal strain of malaria can’t stick to the unusual shape.)..."
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