Gert van der Hoek
In Memoriam - Editor, Senior Moderator
An inconvenient plague
15/03/2007 09:00 - (SA)
Georgina Guedes
After travelling through the remote small towns and dramatically changeable, although tending towards cold, weather conditions of Southern Patagonia, my boyfriend Ter and I were delighted at the prospect of two weeks in bustling, consistently hot Buenos Aires.
Unfortunately, along with heat usually come mosquitoes, and after weeks in the freezing cold Patagonian nights, we surprised by the intensity of the ongoing attacks of these pests on any exposed part of our bodies.
People in our hostel held conversations over breakfast while jiggling and itching at multiple red bumps dotted about their limbs.
We devoted a day to doing the walk through the historic downtown area, culminating in a visit to the gardens in front of The Plaza de Congresso. There was a pretty, shady lawn where we thought we would have a half hour snooze before making our way back through the snarled-up traffic to our hostel.
As soon as we sat down, we were surrounded by a swarming black cloud. We couldn't kill mosquitoes fast enough. As one fell, three took its place. After two minutes, we gave our rest up as a bad idea and caught a taxi home.
Front page news
When we mentioned this assault to the manager of our hostel, he told us that this is unusual for Buenos Aires, and that it is front-page news that a plague of mosquitoes has descended on the city thanks to higher than usual temperatures and rainfall this year.
This immediately brought to mind Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which I had seen a couple of months earlier in Peru. One of the symptoms of global warming, he said, would be an increase in the numbers of disease carrying-mosquitoes to areas in which they had been eradicated.
So this plague on Buenos Aires was in quite stark contrast to the reassuringly expanding glaciers that we'd been looking at in Southern Patagonia. I'd even allowed myself to think that things couldn't be too bad if giant beds of ice were still making their inexorable way across the continent.
To my further consternation, I learnt that the increase in mosquitoes had lead to an epidemic of dengue fever in neighbouring Paraguay, which had now spread to Northern Argentina and Southern Brazil.
Aches and pains
Dengue fever was not something I knew anything about until I started this trip about ten months ago. When we were hiking in the mountains of Laos, we met a fellow traveller with deep rings under his eyes who, after lunch, would suddenly take on the pallor of freshly bleached linen, and start shaking like a leaf.
He would dispatch himself for a three-hour rest. This, his wife explained, was the legacy of a bout of dengue fever that had laid him up for two weeks over a month before.
I immediately referred to my Lonely Planet. There, listed among a variety of other frightening sounding ailments was dengue or breakbone fever, so called because of the frightening muscle and bone aches that accompany its otherwise flu-like symptoms. It is not usually fatal, but incredibly debilitating, and there is no vaccine or cure.
The further we travelled, the more we encountered this frightening disease. Children's hospitals in Cambodia had put signs up in the streets begging for blood donations because of an epidemic of haemorrhagic dengue fever. And now it has cropped up again in South America.
Although there are records of fairly regular outbreaks of dengue fever throughout history, it is the spread of the disease to Buenos Aires, where it is not considered to be endemic, that suggests that this time, we have global warming to thank for the epidemic.
Can't stand the heat
Aside from my encounters with glaciers, in this year of travel, I have come across numerous examples of how our global climate is changing.
In so many places, as we've followed summer around the world, we've been told that we're there for the hottest day on record for this time of year, that rivers have flooded, rains have come early and animals are behaving differently, all because of the increase in heat.
Even news reports from back home tell of Durban households seeing an increased number of snakes seeking refuge from the scorching temperatures. And now, just as Al Gore warned, there are mosquitoes spreading disease to areas that have never been affected before.
We've really gone and done it. We broke our planet.
Georgina Guedes is a South African journalist who quit her job to travel around the world. She is stocking up on powerful mosquito repellent before heading into Brazil.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Columnists/Georgina_Guedes/0,,2-1630-2022_2083909,00.html
15/03/2007 09:00 - (SA)
Georgina Guedes
After travelling through the remote small towns and dramatically changeable, although tending towards cold, weather conditions of Southern Patagonia, my boyfriend Ter and I were delighted at the prospect of two weeks in bustling, consistently hot Buenos Aires.
Unfortunately, along with heat usually come mosquitoes, and after weeks in the freezing cold Patagonian nights, we surprised by the intensity of the ongoing attacks of these pests on any exposed part of our bodies.
People in our hostel held conversations over breakfast while jiggling and itching at multiple red bumps dotted about their limbs.
We devoted a day to doing the walk through the historic downtown area, culminating in a visit to the gardens in front of The Plaza de Congresso. There was a pretty, shady lawn where we thought we would have a half hour snooze before making our way back through the snarled-up traffic to our hostel.
As soon as we sat down, we were surrounded by a swarming black cloud. We couldn't kill mosquitoes fast enough. As one fell, three took its place. After two minutes, we gave our rest up as a bad idea and caught a taxi home.
Front page news
When we mentioned this assault to the manager of our hostel, he told us that this is unusual for Buenos Aires, and that it is front-page news that a plague of mosquitoes has descended on the city thanks to higher than usual temperatures and rainfall this year.
This immediately brought to mind Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which I had seen a couple of months earlier in Peru. One of the symptoms of global warming, he said, would be an increase in the numbers of disease carrying-mosquitoes to areas in which they had been eradicated.
So this plague on Buenos Aires was in quite stark contrast to the reassuringly expanding glaciers that we'd been looking at in Southern Patagonia. I'd even allowed myself to think that things couldn't be too bad if giant beds of ice were still making their inexorable way across the continent.
To my further consternation, I learnt that the increase in mosquitoes had lead to an epidemic of dengue fever in neighbouring Paraguay, which had now spread to Northern Argentina and Southern Brazil.
Aches and pains
Dengue fever was not something I knew anything about until I started this trip about ten months ago. When we were hiking in the mountains of Laos, we met a fellow traveller with deep rings under his eyes who, after lunch, would suddenly take on the pallor of freshly bleached linen, and start shaking like a leaf.
He would dispatch himself for a three-hour rest. This, his wife explained, was the legacy of a bout of dengue fever that had laid him up for two weeks over a month before.
I immediately referred to my Lonely Planet. There, listed among a variety of other frightening sounding ailments was dengue or breakbone fever, so called because of the frightening muscle and bone aches that accompany its otherwise flu-like symptoms. It is not usually fatal, but incredibly debilitating, and there is no vaccine or cure.
The further we travelled, the more we encountered this frightening disease. Children's hospitals in Cambodia had put signs up in the streets begging for blood donations because of an epidemic of haemorrhagic dengue fever. And now it has cropped up again in South America.
Although there are records of fairly regular outbreaks of dengue fever throughout history, it is the spread of the disease to Buenos Aires, where it is not considered to be endemic, that suggests that this time, we have global warming to thank for the epidemic.
Can't stand the heat
Aside from my encounters with glaciers, in this year of travel, I have come across numerous examples of how our global climate is changing.
In so many places, as we've followed summer around the world, we've been told that we're there for the hottest day on record for this time of year, that rivers have flooded, rains have come early and animals are behaving differently, all because of the increase in heat.
Even news reports from back home tell of Durban households seeing an increased number of snakes seeking refuge from the scorching temperatures. And now, just as Al Gore warned, there are mosquitoes spreading disease to areas that have never been affected before.
We've really gone and done it. We broke our planet.
Georgina Guedes is a South African journalist who quit her job to travel around the world. She is stocking up on powerful mosquito repellent before heading into Brazil.
http://www.news24.com/News24/Columnists/Georgina_Guedes/0,,2-1630-2022_2083909,00.html
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