Boogie the Mosquito Hunter

As many of you know, Brandt spent 4 years researching surface proteins that could potentially be used in the development of a malaria vaccine when he was at the National Institutes of Health. He’s hoping to get involved with more applied aspects of malaria research while here in Tanzania but for moment he is battling malaria one mosquito at a time. Despite the screened windows, our room at the guest house is a mosquito sieve. Brandt has been dutifully patrolling our room and the adjoining bathroom every night before we get ready for bed. He hunts down and curses out each individual mosquito in an attempt to prolong our malaria-free time in Tanzania. We are finding ourselves exhausted in the early evenings- probably some combination of the heat and the sensory overload and there’s nothing to do outside our room except getting eaten by mosquitos so we’ve been going to bed pretty early. Unfortunately, we’ve both been finding ourselves wide awake in the middle of the night. We think it’s the jet lag but the sleeping conditions are definitely not helping. Back home, Brandt and I jockey for space in our queen size bed. Here we’re sleeping on what seems to be the world’s smallest double bed walled in by our mosquito net and it’s 87 degrees and humid. (Thanks again Mom for the travel clock thermometer combo- it really helps to know just how hot and miserable we are). So we’re spending hours every night lying awake, held captive in our weaved prison. Quite frankly, it’s starting to make me a bit batty (think Jack in “The Shining”). In spite of our sophisticated mosquito control efforts, we’re still waking up with bites. We’ve found a few inside the net in the morning plus the we seem to get hit when we rest any body part against the net when we are sleeping. This is why when is finally purchase a net, we’ll treat it with insecticide—then those mosquitos that hangout on the net will die, die, die. I seem to be tastier than Brandt, my bites out number his two to one. With each new bite Brandt recalculates the completely made up odds that I now have malaria (he’s says I’m at 7% now). Time will tell.