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When you think of mosquitoes you definitely think of being annoyed by the constant biting that takes place when you are trying to enjoy yourself outdoors. The female of the insect needs to bite host organisms to secure nutrient-rich blood for her eggs. So they attack ferociously.
Mosquitoes would go down in history as just a very annoying pest if they didn’t kill 1 million people every year. That’s right. 1 million people.
Many of you reading this already know that mosquitoes bite people and spread disease. In today’s era, the mosquito still spreads diseases like dengue Fever , Zika virus, West Nile virus, Chikungunya virus, and malaria.
The last disease on that list still kills many thousands of people because they lived in underdeveloped regions and don’t have access to the cheap meds which would cure them. There are roughly 110 trillion mosquitoes in this world and they carry a total of 15 diseases which infect human beings.
I hope you are sitting down for this number. The mosquito is responsible for roughly 52 billion deaths since the dawn of man. In 200,000+ years of existence there have been an estimated 108 billion people. This means that roughly half of all people who ever existed were killed by a mosquito.
Workers faced workplace hazards like rockslides as well as death by mosquito. Photo credit history.com
I got my first real dose of the scale years ago when visiting the Panama Canal. There were gravesites all along the edges and the tour guide actually said there were many many more unmarked graves there too. The number he gave us was that roughly 25,000 people died constructing the canal. In fact, the first attempt to build the canal was abandoned by the French in large part to the death toll.
Yellow fever, malaria and other diseases ravaged the worker camps. Workers forged ahead with disease and death around every corner to finish one of the modern wonders of the world.
