New Zealand Listener - 09.07,2019

52 LISTENER SEPTEMBER 7 2019

by PETER CALDER

W

hat creature has killed the most

humans? It should take barely

a moment’s thought to discard

those fearsome but statistically

insignificant predators that stalk our

nightmares: the shark, say, or the snake.

A bit of lateral thinking will land on the

murderous human, but the average toll

we take on our own species – orchestrated

campaigns of ethnic cleansing aside –

doesn’t come close to the mosquito’s. Its

annual average kill since 2000 has been

about two million. We don’t manage a

quarter of that. Statistical extrapolations

suggest the insect has visited death on half

the people who have ever lived.

The comparison is somewhat specious,

since the mosquito is not a killer, but

rather the principal vector of killer

diseases (and only a few hundred of the

3500 mosquito species work that way).

But that’s a cute distinction to someone

with malaria, the parasite (technically a

plasmodium) that attaches itself to the red

blood cells and is, by far, the mosquito’s

favourite weapon.

Malaria is an old disease: amber-encased

mosquito specimens contain the

infected blood of dinosaurs, it plagued

our ancestors at least six million years

ago and it killed King Tutankhamun

at 18. And although its transmission

confers no benefit on

the mosquito (infecting

humans is an incidental

result, not the purpose,

of its bloodsucking), the

presence of the disease in a

host makes that host more

attractive to the mosquito:

it’s a perfect circle of

evolutionary advantage.

Timothy C Winegard,

a historian at a minor

American university,

specialises in military

history and it shows in this

book, whose subtitle verges on a breach

of trade description law. He spends scant

time on the mosquito’s natural history,

let alone its toll on humans who are not

soldiers, yet virtually every battle from

the defeat of Sennacherib in 701BC to the

failure of the US in Vietnam is laid out in

excruciating, geeky detail.

M

aking matters worse is that Win-

egard’s writing is never better than

indifferent – and it is often dread-

ful. In the book’s very first line, he misuses

“aggravating”, and he sprays adverbs and

metaphors around like DDT, without

pausing to think how nonsensical they

are. A single example may stand for hun-

dreds: having decided to describe malaria

in Africa as “flying under the radar” of

world attention, he cannot resist prefixing

the phrase with “stealthily”. To the groups

that have agitated loudly for decades for

greater resources to be devoted to the

problem, it must be galling to be implic-

itly accused of hiding it.

Meanwhile, his extrava-

gant anthropomorphising

of the mosquito (mating

is called “passion”) both

trivialises his subject and

condescends to his reader.

For all that, fascinations

are to be found – the his-

torical import of opium’s

antimalarial properties

made a great sidebar –

and the final chapters,

which explore eradication

campaigns, gene editing

and the moral and biological unknowns

of destroying such an ancient component

of the ecosystem, get much closer to what

the cover promised.

Readable popular histories of this sort

have been a publishing mainstay for a

generation now, and this one could and

should have been much better than it

is. Too long, marred by digression and

desperately short of

the human touch,

it is an undertaking

beyond the capacity

of a well-intentioned

but lacklustre writer. l

THE MOSQUITO: A Human

History of our Deadliest

Predator, by Timothy C

Winegard (Text, $38).

In the book’s very

first line, he misuses

“aggravating”, and he

sprays adverbs and

metaphors around

like DDT.

AL

AM

Y;^

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TT

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AG

ES

BOOKS&CULTURE

The little pricks

Mankind’s greatest

adversary doesn’t get

the respect it deserves.

Bloodsucker: the

mosquito has visited

death on half the people

who have ever lived.