FRIENDLY MOSQUITOES

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 51, 28 August 1926, Page 17

FRIENDLY MOSQUITOES

Who could have believed .that the malarial mosquito would ever come, bringing healing in its wings'?

Yet this terrible insect, which inflicted disease on whole nations for thousands of years, has been found to carry in the very poison of the germ it harbours an antidote to a form of paralysis from which there was no recovery known to doctors. It was fouud, almost by accident, that patients with this form of paralysis, when infected with malaria, showed signs of improvement. In Liverpool for some time past some such patients have, therefore, been deliberately inoculated with malaria. Some, especially those who were in the early stages of tho disease, have recovered or seem to have recovered.

In some ways malaria might be thought a desperate remedy, but aialaria is curable. The disease it apparently alleviates is otherwise usually fatal. The most extraordinary aspoct of tho "malaria cure" is that if tie patient is quickly infected by the germ he has a better chance of rallying from his paralysis.

Malarial mosquitoes cannot easily be brought from tho regions where they abound, so. English mosquitoes are first infected with the germ and then allowed to infect the patients in their turn. It is a very delicate operation, and perhaps one ought not to say that the remedy is one that can be depended on; but the Liverpool observers, who have been very careful, have high hopes of it.

They have been carrying on their work now for four years, and they report that, though some of the patients who were infected with malaria received no benefit, about one in four of those treated have regained their powers and have been able to return to civil life. At first paralytic patients were infected with the malaria germ from the blood of people known to have it, but this method was discontinued as being too dangerous.

The procedure of infection by mosquitoes then followed. The kind of malaria which they convey is that known as Bonign Tertian, which, as its name implies, is a mild form of the disease.

The mosquitoes belong to the Ministry of Health, which breeds them; and one of their officials carries them to the institution where they are wanted. The insects are starved for a few days before being applied to the patient, who should develop malaria in about a fortnight.

The mosquitoes employed are brought from Bomney Marsh, which for hundreds of years has had a great reputation for its mosquitoes, though it is only tho summer visitors who call them by that name. To the farmers and the shepherds who tend their sheep among tho innumerable dykes of tho marsh, where tho insects breed, they are just gnats.