I see South African scientists have discovered chemical compounds that they hope can be developed into a super-duper new malaria drug. Good news.
I hope it works out. Got me thinking about insects and their impact on people. Apart from killer mosquitoes, there are fleas that can carry plague like the Black Death, ticks that give you tick-bite fever, bees and wasps that sting, putsi flies that lay eggs in you and many others. All nasty, yet none of them makes me gril. Unlike cockroaches. They really make me gril and I don’t know why. I discovered there are huge numbers of cockroaches in Thailand. I particularly remember them while on a stunning 6-day hike through the hill country from Mae Hong Son to Chiang Rai. We had hired two men as guides: one who spoke hill tribe languages and Thai, the other who spoke Thai and English. What a trip, through forests and over hills, through remote villages and along rivers. We carried sleeping bags and stayed with villagers at night. The houses were built of teak and stood on stilts. Many of the women still wore traditional dress. We never saw another tourist. It was scorchingly hot – average temperature in April is 38C – but I loved it. At one village we stayed in, the household men had politely moved out to sleep on the wooden verandah, leaving us to sleep with the women. Just as I was drifting off, I heard a scratching noise. I switched on my torch. A few inches away was an enormous cockroach munching a discarded chicken bone. Ugh. I picked up my boot and whacked him. Later I heard scratching from the wall. I switched on my torch and saw the entire wall was crawling with cockroaches. I called out to my friend: “Wake up, the wall is covered in cockroaches!” “Just face the other way and you won’t see them,” came the reply. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I shone my torch anywhere there were cockroaches scurrying around, and some really close, just looking at me. I hate that. I knew I would not sleep a wink. But where to go? The men had politely moved outside to sleep, so suddenly moving out to join them seemed a bit rude. But faced with being polite or being the centre of a nightlong cockroach fest, I threw manners to the wind and tiptoed out to the verandah. Of course the men woke up and looked at this odd foreigner coming to doss with them. The guide asked why I was coming to sleep with the men. I could hardly say because this guy’s house is crawling with cockroaches, so I mumbled that I wanted to sleep under the stars. He looked at me askance, they all shifted up and I fell into a blissful, cockroach-free sleep.
