Indian creepy crawlies

Bismillah, alhamdulillah.

Being well bitten and covered with itchy lumps and bumps all over is one of the necessary evils of a visit to India. Mosquitoes are ubiquitous especially where standing pools of water lie nearby in the form of wells or shallow underground sewer systems with open lids. The swarm of mosquitoes can be readily noticed as they form an attack formation close to sunset time and hone in on their victim with unswerving accuracy plunging their nozzles into bare skin, with the kind squirt of an anaesthetic to prevent us from splatting them to death. The odd time a mosquito is laden with human blood it can become sluggish and a quick splat will result in an exploding mosquito and small splatter of red blood on your clothes.

Mosquitoes are not the only creepy crawlies that are famous in India but other common varieties include, red ants, battle ants, cockroaches, bed bugs (Ur. khatmal) and lice (Ur. juwwa). Bed bugs, casting my mind back to the late seventies were quite ubiquitous in houses, known to entomologists (insect experts) as ’structural bugs’ they can colonise cracks in bed frames and even the round buttons that occur on mattresses. But recently, over the last 10-15 years, advances in the widespread use of cement in building houses has resulted in a much decreased incidence of bed bugs. Visits to houses where the traditional mud walls are still in use still suffer from the bug of bed bugs. According to entomologist experts at the centre for entomology (the study of insects) at Cambridge University in the UK, the only way to get rid of bed bugs under such circumstances would be to call for professional help from pest control agencies as available insecticides available to the public are insufficient.

Mosquito repellant netting on windows have become popular and more widely used, coupled with insect repellents that are released into the room via small electrical devices these give a relatively mosquito free night. These kits are widely available from shops for a cost around 45 Rupees. Some people have inventively placed a mosquito repellant liquid atomiser in every single room and keep the house therefor covered. The 45 Rupees is meant to last 40 odd days but will finish in a third of the time if kept on during the whole day.

Body repellents are not widely available and there is only one which is widely available called Odomos, it comes as a liquid or a green cream which is applied to the exposed areas. I was unable to locate DEET based repellents and had to rely on my ‘imported’ stores of DEET canisters, which very very effective. Many people mentioned that dark clothing was attractive to mosquitoes and brighter clothing was unattractive to them. In fact someone mentioned that his wife was hardly ever bitten while he was bitten quite a lot, this in fact reflected a similar distribution of bites in our own family.

After a little bit of research on the topic it seems that mosquitoes detect their prey by a combination of carbon dioxide gradients, heat and body odours. Male odours  are clearly preferable and they are supposed to expire more carbon dioxide, supposedly through their skin!

I though I would leave you with a paragraph from the Entomology Centre talking about mosquitoes and how to prevent their breeding:

Thus, a more effective form of control is to control the larvae, either by actually killing them or by destroying the breeding grounds of the mosquito. Mosquitoes lay eggs in standing water, close to the water surface. The larvae, when they hatch remain under water either hanging down from the surface or laying parallel to it. Hence larvae can be controlled by removing all standing water in and around human habitation or draining the land using narrow, steep-sided ditches in the case of wet, marshy areas. A new technique that has proved successful in the case of pit latrines is to add expended polystyrene balls to the water which prevents larvae from reaching the surface to respire and adults from being able to lay eggs.

 

Acknowledgements

Pictures are taken from the Medical Entomology Centre website.

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