Aedes vittatus: The Mosquito Everyone Should Fear

You can name the most feared animal on the planet. To boot, you can name the most venomous snakes, from King Cobras to Black Mambas, but these animals cannot dare compare to the damage done by one speck of an insect: the mosquito. Timothy Winegard, a Canadian historian, sets the record straight in his piece, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator. In America, we hardly notice this flying pest. But we may have to now, especially now that a new breed has been found in American soil, the Aedes vittatus. As a whole, about 108 human beings have walked the Earth since the very first man came to be. That’s how demographers estimate it. That number is certainly a lot. But the same experts agree about half of that, or 52 billion humans, have perished due to mosquito-borne diseases. Indeed, CDC has branded the mosquito as the world’s deadliest animal, killing over a million people worldwide every year. Don’t think for a minute that mosquitoes are a problem; you can easily swat. It’s far more sinister than that.