Trial by Justice Anopheles

Trial by Justice Anopheles 

By Clem Oluwole

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Subsequently, He filled it with all manner of creatures. And mosquito was one of them. I really do not know why mosquitoes exist, the purpose they serve or of what use they are to mankind except to enrich orthodox and unorthodox medicine men and women who treat malaria. Lest you misunderstand me, I am not questioning God’s judgment for creating the deadly insects. Mosquitoes are not the only deadly creatures around. I know He decreed that man should have dominion over all things He created. So I cannot fathom at what point we lost our authority over mosquitoes that they have become the death of mankind. It was not so in the beginning. And I believe it was not meant to be now.

According to the biblical account, Adam and Eve cohabited with all creatures in the Garden of Eden. In fact, it was Adam that gave names to all the animals, including the menace called mosquitoes, lions and snakes. The question is where was the predatory instinct of beasts like tigers during their naming ceremony? But if you attribute the lost camaraderie between Adam/Eve and the dangerous animals to the fall of the couple in the Garden, what about the situation that existed between Noah, his family and the selected creatures God asked him to assemble into his ark prior to the annihilation of mankind and animalkind?

The only time wild beasts showed reverence to a man was when Daniel was hurled into the lion’s den. Ordinarily, the beasts would have had a rare meal which was what king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon intended Daniel to be anyway. Among all the deadliest creatures cohabiting with mankind, perhaps the most dangerous are mosquitoes. Yes, snakes are deadly. Lions, tigers and the likes are equally deadly. But how many people get killed by these animals yearly? There are frightening statistics out there to prove that mosquitoes are in the forefront of creatures that play God, deciding who should live and who should die, especially among kids.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), malaria, which is the weapon anopheles mosquitoes employ to afflict mankind, is the leading cause of infant mortality, afflicting children who are mostly under five, especially in Africa. In fact, more than 10 per cent of the continent’s health burden is malaria-driven. WHO’s startling figures released last year showed that about 3.3bn people in 109 countries are at the risk of contracting malaria and it afflicts more than 500 million folks yearly. Although I cannot lay my fingers on the annual casualty figures, it will not be an exaggeration to say that over 70 per cent of them are executed annually on the orders of Justice Anopheles, the carrier of the killer parasites.

And so, when a leading malariologist, Prof. Akintunde Sowumi, apparently driven by the frustration that followed the ineffectiveness of primordial strategies, suggested that in order to eradicate malaria, every Nigerian should kill a mosquito daily, I quickly keyed into it. The professor made the seeming laughable call while interacting with journalists at a Pfizer-organised interactive session to mark last year’s World Malaria Day. Prof. Sowumi hit the bull’s eye when he declared that malaria kills more quickly than the dreaded HIV/AIDS. Though laughable, I embraced the idea. A year has rolled by and another Malaria Day is around the corner. And from what I see around me, the battle is far from being won. In fact, it is an unwinnable war! This is because even if an individual eliminates as many as a battalion of mosquitoes daily, each justice has the capacity to breed as many as 10 times that number to replace those eliminated, given the miserable environmental conditions that the masses live in, which are defined by bushes and stagnant water.

Now that it has become increasingly difficult to eliminate the killer insects from the Dark Continent, the craze now is to go preventive. All manner of roll-back-malaria lines of attack are being put in place. One of them is the use of insecticide-treated mosquito nets. Then, there is also the (regular) use of atomized sprays, application of mosquito repellant cream, sniper and otapiapia, among other measures. Some go on Daraprim, the famous Sunday-Sunday medicine. However, these so-called end-time insects have continued to reinvent themselves, resisting drugs and/or finding their way around the crush barriers thrown up by modern medicines. In times past, a shot of Chloroquine was all you needed to free yourself from the justice’s trial. Today, one has to combine all kinds of drugs including antibiotics to argue your case. Many are not so fortunate to escape the vampire justice… they get sentenced to their early graves.

The piece you have read is a rehash of the one first published in the LEADERSHIP of April 14, 2010, entitled “The ruthlessness of Justice Anopheles”. I decided to reproduce it to mark this year’s Malaria Day which was celebrated at the weekend (April 25, 2015) and as part of my own contribution towards drawing extra attention to the global scourge. And I am one of them, down with the attack for the past one week and the fourth since the beginning of the year. The first time I was dragged before the justice, she slammed me with a two-count charge… meaning two pluses in my blood system. I took some medications, went back to the justice and one count was dropped. After going back and forth, swallowing malaria tablets like a fowl feeding on grains, the remaining count refused to go away. So, I had to consult a doctor friend who prescribed treatment by injection. That is what I have just taken and I intend to go for another test by next week to see if the ruthless blood-sucking Justice has finally dropped the second charge against me.