Mosquitoes and Malaria

Malaria is a very real threat and has a high prevalence in Kenya, and to my experience also in Voi.  No worries, I haven’t personally had Malaria, but listening to people here, it’s like a really big flu that just never leaves their community.  Imagine H1N1 for the next 30 years.  Everyone knows it’s serious, and they are mindful of it to a point, but they also live with the constant threat of it, which makes people a little less paranoid.  Malaria is an unfortunate fact of life.

As far as I'm concerned, I’m on malaria prophylaxis, and living in a place where medications and skilled professionals who know how to handle the disease are abundant, so I don’t worry about it that much.  That, however, does not mean that I don’t worry about mosquitoes.  Upon arrival I noted how very small these mosquitoes are.  They don’t tend to buzz around my ears and all in all they don’t really annoy me all that much.  They are quite tame compared to the mosquitoes I grew up with and have encountered in my travels.  I was even pleased when I finally got my first, second, and third mosquito bites that the bites don’t really itch all that much.  I was aware of them, but only enough to feel the need to rub my skin once or twice and then it felt better and I could ignore it again ……… unfortunately, that wore off.  I let my guard down, I wore a skirt to dinner, forgot the 100% DEET, and didn’t ask for a mosquito coil (dinner is under cover but open air, and mosquito coils do the job of citronella candles, but work more like incense).  For the gold star on this perfect night, the manager also came the next morning to apologize because he had been otherwise occupied and hadn’t sprayed my room with insecticide before I went to bed.  I told him it wasn’t a big deal, we’d do better the next time, and thanked him for letting me know.  That was before the 12 hour mark.  The bites that I had received the night before were relatively calm … between about 12-36 hours after the bites occur the itching is the worst, and they start to get inflamed.  Here is the result:

That plus an itch that made me want to literally remove my skin.  I would stress here, that quite often when people say things starting in “I would literally ….” They use it to exaggerate, and they really wouldn’t literally even want to do whatever they were saying.  No, no, if I thought removing the tops of skin off of each and every one of these bites would have helped I probably would have done it at least until the pain of those that I had completed, dulled the itch for the remaining bites.  I even sent out a text asking “Know of any remedies for mosquito bites?  …… Other than removing my legs?”  It really was that bad.  The response I received suggested salt, lemon, banana peel, vinegar, asprin, and toothpaste.  Toothpaste being the only thing I had in the room, it was the first try.  God that stuff is amazing.  So now whenever I have bites I am blue with Colgate.  Luckily I’m better at prevention now and although the reaction seems to be getting bigger, I only ever have a few at a time. 

               So when I see a whole busload of amercian tourists pile into the hotel and leave their tents & doors open, or are sitting out on their patios reading wearing shorts and either short sleeve shirts or tiny tank tops, I can’t help but cringe.  They’ll learn sooner or later.  Dinner time, which happens to be dusk or later = long pants, socks, sneakers, long sleeves and DEET, DEET, DEET.  So much for my avoidance of chemicals.  The benefits outweigh this particular risk.