Thick-Skinned in the Jungle, and Even in Illinois

I have a mosquito bite. Actually, I have about 15 of them, but the most recent one, the one I am focused on this minute, is the one I picked up last week in Illinois.

The mosquito is powerful in many places today. Powerful enough to make governments, parents and the bitten jump. Powerful enough to keep folks in a dozen states, including Illinois, on their toes this summer as human cases of West Nile virus, a sometimes fatal disease, have been reported.

The parents of a 6-year-old I visited in a small town outside Chicago take the matter very seriously: Their daughter can play outside, but not until she is sprayed down with insect repellent, and not after sundown, as that is when not only the boogeyman but also virus-carrying mosquitoes have a reputation for coming out.

I feel like I am coming to my appreciation of mosquito dangers rather late in life.

As a kid, I got chewed up plenty--and it was an annoyance--but we were never worried about the bite of a ‘skeeter. Bites from rattlesnakes, or black widow spiders, those we were afraid of and took action to avoid (I learned from my dad that one should always shake out one’s boots before putting them on, just in case, as had happened once to someone who knew someone he knew, a rattler had crawled inside for a nap. And my mom taught me, that, when unfolding a stored blanket, I should shake it out in case a black widow had settled there).

When my own daughter was little, I’m afraid I did nothing concrete to protect her from mosquitoes, rattlers or black widows. A luxury, I like to think, of growing up in urban Southern California rather than malfeasance on my part. (For the record, I did slather sun block on her from time to time.)

The mosquito bite I picked up in Illinois appeared despite the fact that I have the following recently purchased repellent products at my fingertips: REI Jungle Juice 100, active ingredient N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide ( or DEET, in common parlance); Sawyer clothing spray, active ingredient permethrin; Avon’s Skin-So-Soft, active ingredient IR3535 ethyl butylacetylamino-propionate. None of them worked, but of course, that may be because I did not apply any of them to my person.

I don’t own all those products because I was going into West Nile virus territory. They are leftovers from an earlier trip this summer to the Tropics, a trip on which I figured I had better prepare, as never before, to battle mosquitoes. I knew the stories of how malaria had felled thousands in the cause of building the Panama Canal, and how most Central American countries had been experiencing outbreaks of dengue fever, and figured the mosquitoes of Costa Rica were probably something to be reckoned with.

Lots of anti-mosquito advice came my way. Don’t eat sweets, mosquitoes sense it in your pores and are attracted, advised one person over lunch and dessert. Take B-complex vitamins, a Web site urged, and mosquitoes will turn their noses up at you.

“DEET, DEET, DEET,” said a friend, in retrospect, after returning with some whopper bites from a lakeside visit in Michigan.

One piece of advice I did prepare to follow: Wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants. Like much good advice, following it required some discomfort given that the heat and humidity were always about 85 to 90.

You can probably understand my surprise when--armed with the various mosquito-fighting chemical potions that my traveling companion (my sister-in-law from New York) and I had brought with us on this trip--I heard our first guide in Costa Rica telling us not to worry about mosquitoes.

“Here we are,” he said, as our little boat wound its way through canals in a remote rain forest, “in the middle of nowhere, and there are no mosquitoes, right?” He was right of course.

Which isn’t the same as saying there are no mosquitoes in the middle-of-nowhere’s jungles.

His eco-friendly advice: Carry insect repellent with you, but only apply it when you actually encounter mosquitoes.

I believed he had no reason not to be honest in this matter, so as we crisscrossed the country, encountering crocodiles, bullet ants and potholes big enough to swallow Jeeps full of tourists, I wore long sleeves and long pants and applied mosquito repellent sparingly.

In the end, my devil-may-care strategy was not completely successful (I was perhaps too sparing a time or two with the repellent, never touched a B-complex vitamin, did eat sweets most days) and ended up picking up a nice array of bites around both ankles (which accounts for the high bite count noted earlier).

The first newspaper I picked up when I got back in the States contained the headline “West Nile Virus Death Is 1st Confirmed in U.S. in 2002.” Out of the jungle and into the frying pan.

Near as I can tell, I do not have malaria or dengue fever from my Costa Rican bites, nor West Nile Virus from my Illinois bite. As I scratch away at their remnants, I will try to maintain a casual demeanor, even on days when I think I notice that my throat feels a tad scratchy ... or my head aches just a bit. I want mosquitoes out of the headlines so I can worry about bigger things--like rattlesnakes and black widow spiders.