fever and ague

If you loved Little House on the Prairie series as a child like I loved Little House on the Prairie, then you probably remember the chapter in the second book when the family got malaria. Everyone was so sick that they took turns crawling to the water pail to distribute dippers of water to make sure they didn't dehydrate. It sounds like a thoroughly miserable time.

We've had almost 20 inches of rain in the last month in our part of the city. Most of it has fallen in the last two weeks, with 13 inches falling in a single day two weeks ago, followed up by a torrential, night-long thunderstorm a couple of nights ago. The ground squishes when we walk on it. It's so humid that I've had to run out twice to replace our halloween pumpkins when they've molded. The ditches all around town are still full of water.

In most parts of the country, you wouldn't have to worry about mosquitoes on Halloween, but we've been swarming with them in the last couple of weeks. We killed eight in the car on the way home from parent's night at Bryce's school last week. We all wore bug repellent at the trunk or treat on Friday night, and Annie and Isaac are both covered in bites after playing in the backyard for an hour or so this afternoon. We've gone through most of a bottle of Benadryl spray since the big rain.

When we were in Utah this summer, my sister-in-law was (minorly) freaking out that she had been bitten by a mosquito one evening while watering her lawn. She was nervous about West Nile disease. In fact, everyone in Utah seems pretty worried about West Nile virus. There are billboards on the highways with instructions to cover up and wear bug spray, and it seemed that I saw at least four or five stories on the news about the virus during the two weeks I was in town. I just checked the most recent statistics, and there have been 51 cases of West Nile in Salt Lake county in 2006.

Here in Houston, I've heard about West Nile in the media exactly once, about a month ago. I was surprised, because the lack of coverage made me think that West Nile virus wasn't a problem here. I just looked up the number of cases in Houston, and there have been 55. I guess bug-borne illnesses aren't as sexy as convenience store robberies or five-alarm house fires or multiple murders. When we lived in Minnesota we'd laugh about the reports of fender benders on the news, and in Houston the goriest tv I watch on any given day is probably the local morning news. Maybe it's good public health that makes West Nile such a big story in Utah, but maybe it's just a less-dangerous place to live than Houston is.

I did hear the mosquito trucks out spraying tonight. Maybe we won't have to worry about fever and ague after all. Maybe I'll even sleep with my windows open. Probably not, though. Watching the news in Houston may make me lax about my risks from West Nile, but it has made me paranoid about locking my doors and windows.

--originally published 10/30/06