Gen- Corona Mosquitoes

 

‘Please save the humans to save us!’

You would not believe it but a shower of tiny bits of paper landed all over my balcony last Sunday. Irritated at having to clean up in this hot weather, I picked the scraps up all the while cursing whoever had thrown them. Then I noticed that there were tiny scrawls on each neat square. This caught my attention. The writing was so small that I had to peer and focus to read. I even took photos of some and magnified them on my phone to be able to read them. Naturally out of curiosity I read one, then the second, then the third, fourth, fifth and so on… almost all of those I could read.

Slowly tears started to stream down my eyes, my throat choked, my nose went red and sobs shook my whole being. Here I was worried only about my own selfish healthy existence in this big world while the other living creatures breathing the same air that I breathe, were going through a harrowing time on this planet.

I am sharing with you the story I gathered from those fragments of paper. Since the writing was very small and each piece told only a part of the whole issue, I had to piece it together to make sense.  But to the impatient ones, let me reveal that it was a cry for help from our housemates, the mosquitoes. I copy below their tale of woes:

"This continuing onslaught of Coronavirus in the last two years is playing havoc with our population. There is a famine due to the shortage of blood.

Schools, restaurants, malls, gyms, swimming pools, clubs and bars, which used to be crowded to capacity, are now closed. Only 50 % of the staff go to work in offices every day.

We especially loved henna artists, manicurists and even food cart owners because their business stopped people from clapping us to death. But since crowds have been banned, there are no big celebrations for marriage or other occasions and their skills are not being sought after.

As it is we were finding it tough digging for food beneath the botox and silicone in some bodies. Now humans are also swallowing so many immunity-boosters in such large quantities that it would not be a surprise if our bite stopped resulting in even a sand grain-sized tiny bump on their exposed skin any more.

Members of ours species who had learnt to fight chemicals and intelligent human endeavours like repellants creams, sprays and insecticides etc. are now dying of starvation.

We are fighting a losing battle against the sanitization mania but for how long we do not know. What to talk of hospitals, even shops, offices and houses are sanitized several times a day with harmful chemicals.

There is indiscriminate use of alcohol in the form of sanitizers. As a result a considerable percentage of our population has become alcoholic. Suffering from stress and anxiety, some have even started smoking. We do not want our species to turn into humans and destroy ourselves.

We used to thrive in living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms and gardens. But humans are not living there any more. They are rushing to hospitals, scurrying for help, breathing directly from oxygen cylinders. They are being attended to by people dressed in unpierceable costumes on roads, cars, e-rickshaws and you only know where. We cannot reach them.

Not only that, they are giving away so much blood for testing and re-testing several times for this virus that there is hardly any left for us to suck on.

The human population, the vast resource of our literal lifeblood for centuries, is now fast depleting. They are dying by the hundreds every day.

There is discrimination against us in another way. People working from home are being called ‘houseflies’ but we have not been given credit in any field so far. This is a big blow to our dignity.

In our schools we proudly taught our children our motto - Just because we are small does not mean we cannot make a big impression. We have been working since God knows when but nobody is scared of us any more. This unseen, invisible monster has wiped out the fear of our whole species and given a blow to our self-esteem and dignity. We cannot even show our face to our children.

We used to look upon the advent of internet as a blessing. Because of that, newspapers and magazines were getting thinner and we were considering ourselves fortunate that humans would not be able to kill us with these weakened weapons. But people working from home do not allow us to rest our weary bodies mid-flight on the computer screen even for a few seconds.

We tried everything in the book and out of the box for survival. We tried sending our various battalions to different cities but people laughed at us, “Whoever dies of malaria or dengue in Corona times,” was their cruel remark.

Not only can we not transmit the virus to humans, we are short of researchers who can tell which strain might even hit our population. To add to our misery, human research has not been helpful. It does not even consider our presence in the transmission chain.

According to

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01574-4

Roughly a dozen animals are known to be susceptible to the virus. Several species, including pet dogs and cats, captive lions and tigers, and farmed mink, almost certainly caught the virus from people. That probably means that related canids, felids and mustelids — the group that includes mink, weasels, badgers, martens and wolverines — could also be susceptible, but so far, no one has checked, says Jürgen Richt, a veterinary virologist at Kansas State University in Manhattan. Cats, ferrets, hamsters and horseshoe bats were all able to pass the coronavirus to animals of the same species in the lab, and mink living in close quarters on Dutch farms have passed the infection between them.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16537157/

talks of detection of various coronaviruses among birds.

But no insects have been included in the list. While it does not affect the self-esteem of other insects, it is shattering the self-confidence of our species because we have shared our environs with these selfish humans for centuries.

One of our learned scholars has read Wikipedia’s information that though we can transmit  various diseases like malaria, dengue, West Nile Virus, chikungunya, yellow fever, filariasis, Zika fever, and several kinds of encephalitis, including the Japanese one as well as newly detected Keystone Virus and Rift Valley Fever, and cause one million deaths each year, there is no evidence that Covid-19 can be transmitted by us, and it is extremely unlikely this could occur.  Also HIV/AIDS is not transmittable through mosquito contact, despite being caused by a virus that can be transmitted.

There is another factor. Some humans are milking the pandemic by charging astonishing amounts on essentials like medicines, oxygen, hospital admissions and expenses. But we mosquitoes do not use currency or have bank accounts. So there is no system of savings or hoarding.

Please help our species to survive. Unlike most other animals and birds we cannot survive without the humans however cruel they might be to most of us. Please save the humans so that we do not slowly join the dinosaurs and dodos in getting extinct."

These heart-breaking pleas and memoranda were being sent to some unknown authority by the representatives of the species which I  guessed had met to observe World Malaria day on April 25, i.e. last Sunday. But I had no way of informing the senders that their cries for help had landed at the wrong place. God seems to be overworked these days and in the cacophony of the crazy spread of Covid-19 and the blame-game surrounding it, the assembly and panchayat polls, and the common man’s struggle for his daily bread, their cries must have gone unheard.  

It made me realise that their existence with and among us for so long has not only been a topic of conservation and cause for concern, but also encouraged action and research in sanitation, medicine, mechanical and electrical device sectors etc, giving employment, sense of purpose, name and fame to hundreds among us.

Not surprisingly then, since that day whenever I feel an itch and find a mosquito sitting on any part of my body, I cannot decide whether to slap it to death and save my species or let it live to save its kind. I watch it ballooning as it sucks my blood. Maybe I should desist from killing that mosquito because it is turning into a kin, it has my blood running in its circulatory system which gives it life and keeps it alive. I am confused as I pick up the bottle of Calamine to soothe the angry red itching spots.

                                                                                 - Anupama S Mani