Things that go buzz in the night: why mosquito & tick season is more than a nuisance
When I stayed with my late mother in South Texas in 2016, there was a Zika Virus * scare, and so even sweeping the back porch was a fraught exercise in mosquito dodgeball. I remember scurrying about so fast that I likely made more of a mess than I helped. Spending summers in South Texas at my grandmother's, I was always mosquito-bite ridden. It was annoying, I itched, but I was young. Remember youth? We were never going to get really sick, much less die. But these days I take, and you should take, the threats posed by mosquitoes and ticks very seriously. ............................ SciLine, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recently hosted a panel of scientists to discuss said threats ("Ticks, Mosquitoes and Rising Disease Risk"). Some of the takeaways were that climate change can, but does not necessarily portend, the deletirious effects of mosquito and tick season on a population. Interestingly, changes in land use also play huge facto...