麻豆传媒

HOW many summers have been made excruciating by the whine of mosquitoes? Sleepless nights, frantic scratching and painful swellings 鈥� no wonder mosquito hieroglyphs were included in Egyptian curses, and Assyrians and Babylonians had devil gods associated with buzzing insects.

But this is as nothing compared with the death and destruction wrought by humanity鈥檚 greatest predator, an insect that can drink three times its body weight of blood in one meal and collectively kill more people than any weapon.

Five hundred people a year die from attacks by hippopotamuses, crocodiles claim a thousand, and 25,000 are killed by dogs. But mosquitoes kill hundreds of thousands annually through malaria.

Collectively, mosquitoes transmit 15 diseases, including five forms of malaria, yellow fever, zika and West Nile virus, and elephantiasis-producing worms. This is despite us having the chemicals to help keep such scourges at bay.

In the past, these weren鈥檛 available. Of the 100 billion or so Homo sapiens who ever lived, half may have been killed by malaria. With the sheer Malthusian impact of malaria established early in The Mosquito, its author Timothy Winegard, a professor of history at Colorado Mesa University, shows how much of the human story was shaped by the mosquito.

Forget generals and armies, politicians and plots 鈥� in much of the world, at some time or other, people were just too enervated by the fevers of malaria to make history. The list of malaria鈥檚 military victories is long, from centuries of defeating attacks on Rome to the faltering of Kublai Khan鈥檚 invasion of the Khmer civilisation, through the Crusades and the glacial progress of British Imperial forces in Southern Africa, to more recent conflicts such as the聽Vietnam war.

Then there are historical figures whose careers were brought to a febrile close. Tutankhamun, Alexander the Great and Genhgis Khan are among the famous dead that Winegard documents, along with an unsung 95 million indigenous people in Central and South America who died after European colonists brought malarial mosquitoes with them.

The historical reach of malaria is with us still and makes for some strange connections. For example, what is the link between the domestication of the yam some 8000 years ago and the annual unavailability of some American football players for games at Denver Broncos鈥檚 stadium? (Spoiler alert, sickle-cell anaemia is involved.)

There is no end of fascinating details: elephants wrinkle their skin to crush mosquitoes; young reindeer get bitten 9000 times a minute in peak season; and the word 鈥渁bracadabra鈥� was used by early Christians on anti-malarial amulets.

It is all written with great brio, allowing readers to relish the connections between the collapse of societies, the failure of grand invasion plans and the rise and demise of insecticide DDT, while keeping the sheer destructive power of the tiny creature in mind.

Winegard鈥檚 final chapters deal with the likely responses of Aedes and Anopheles mosquitoes to the changing climate. To animals that began by parasitising dinosaurs and then jumped to birds and mammals, the warmer future looks rosy indeed.