Scientists suggest new paradigm needed for regional threats

Scientists are deeply divided over how to fight one of the great threats to our homeland security. Some favor the pragmatic realpolitic of flicking the menace away, while idealists push for wholesale change, crushing the threat and ending its evil-doing for all eternity. It seems that a 57-year old woman recently died of a fungal infection in her muscles called Brachiola algerae. Brachiola is typically not found in mosquito saliva, so it couldn't have come simply from the bite. The authors of the New England Journal of Medicine report concluded that the infection was caused by squashing the mosquito into the woman's skin in the midst of being bitten. "I think if a mosquito was in mid-bite, it would be wiser to flick the mosquito off rather than squashing it," said one of the authors, Christina Coyle of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The idealists scoff at such a namby-pamby reaction, and suggest an UN multilaterist approach only pushes the problem down the road, and a mushroom cloud of DTT as our smoking gun. Or something like that. Despite the Pennsylvania woman's case, Roger Nasci, a mosquito expert at a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web sites) facility in Fort Collins, Colo., said there is no scientific basis for switching to flicking. He also pointed out that flicking the bugs off is not a permanent solution. "Unfortunately, then the mosquito often goes on to bite another person, or bites you again," Nasci said. Thank God we have leaders for our times who know that simply flicking off a problem will not do. Sure, old women with immune deficiencies might get hurt, but we can risk mixing up some of the old dictators bacteria and DNA with our own in the fight to rid ourselves of meddlesome regional troublemakers. Or something like that.

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