Mosquitoes and Jayne Mansfield

July 8, 1999
Houston

The city of New Orleans was founded amidst a swampy, marshy alluvial plain, which, millions of years ago, was part of a Greater Everglades - the very same Everglades that still exists in south Florida. Nature has had her way since the the dawn of time. But Man, in his self-styled wisdom, has sought to change this arrangement. In so doing, he has, in many cases, upset the delicate balance of ecology. He reaps short-term benefits from his short-sightedness, and in the long run, untold dire consequences may well be in store for Mankind.

Since the arrival of humans in this part of North America some tens of thousands of  years ago, there has been  a somewhat easy cohabitation of Man, plant and animal. The first arrivals to the "New World", the Native Americans, it seems, were more able to adapt to their environment, rather than to seek to change it to suit them.

With the arrival of the Europeans in the latter part of the 15th Century, changes began to take place in order to accommodate the "newcomers." Forests were initially felled for housing material and wagon-building, as well as burned to make way for farmland. Brush and prairie alike were scoured clean of living things to make way for his cities - as John Denver sang to us: "more people, more scars upon the land." Animals were hunted, some to the brink of extinction, not just for food, but sometimes only for their fur; other times they were slaughtered just for sport.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the "engines of enginuity" of which he so wildly boasted, began to leave a legacy of junkyards, fossil fuel depletion, as well as water and air pollution. The blue, clear sky our forefathers saw had turned into a sickening haze - and it did so within my lifetime. CO2 levels have risen to dramatic heights.

Canals were dug for navigation and later for oil exploration, letting salt water enter fresh water marsh, killing the vegetation. So the marshlands were endangered. Rivers were damed, creating lakes where no lakes had been, while elsewhere lakes were filled in order to create more land. Even the mighty Mississippi has been confined within a system of levees, thus preventing natural floods from depositing fertile aluvium onto the land.


Saltwater intrusion into marshlands has now caused irreversible soil erosion in south Louisiana. This plus the deprivation of annual riverborn aluvium deposits, and natural soil subsidance without natural replacement has resulted in the gradual submergence of the lowlying coastal areas of Louisiana.

The state of Louisiana is literally disappearing - and at a rapid rate!

And then there is the mosquito. This pesky insect has been on the planet much longer than Man himself. Fossil mosquitos found in amber date back as far as the Jurassic Age. It has its part in Nature.

But modern Man could not abide this lowly creature.

Perhaps elsewhere this winged insect is lightly dismissed, but in New Orleans, even to the present day, this bloodsucking fly is taken deadly seriously. When my grandfather was a boy, he used to talk to the old folks about days gone by. The "good old days" were old, all right, but they were not good at all. In the mid-1800's, the Crescent City was visited almost annually by "Bronze John"- the swamp terror known as YELLOW FEVER!

(Called "Bronze" because of the color the skin turned when one was afflicted with the almost-always fatal malady, and John was used because it sounded like the French word for yellow -  jaune.)

My grandfather told me that one day when he was young, he spoke to an ex-slave, who would drive an open wagon down the streets of the city during the epidemics, callling out: "Bring out your dead!"  People would appear at their front gates with one or sometimes more bodies, and after charging his wagon with its macabre cargo, the people would quickly disappear back into their houses.  Most of the bodies would wind up by being buried in mass graves lined with quicklime, and without tombstones or markers, and sometimes only with the bare minimum of sacraments performed.

There were just too many deaths at once.

Hundreds of people died horribly under the grips of Bronze John, the deaths were a mistery. Eventually, Cuban doctor Finlay and American doctor Walter Reel discovered its cause:  it was the MOSQUITO that carried this deadly disease.  Aedes Aegypti mosquitos that carry Yellow Fever live in swamps, and therefore the the way to get rid of the disease was to destroy the mosquito's habitat. Swamps and bayous were drained and filled in, and others were covered with oil to prevent the mosquito larvae from hatching.

Soon the epidemic was over. Mortality rates from la fièvre jaune soon plummeted to zero. Man, it appears, won this battle, but in the process did irreversible damage to the environment, killing fish, birds, , etc. Fortunately for the residents of the city of New Orleans, by 1860 the feared Yellow Fever and even Dengue Fever, too, disappeared, never to be seen again in New Orleans.

However, soon another breed of mosquito, the Aegis Egypti,  appeared. Other types of mosquitoes from elsewhere also proliferated in some of the remaining swampy areas not inhabited by the carriers of Yellow Fever.

By 1960, 100 years after the eradication of Yellow Fever mosquitoes were still in plentiful supply, especially after spring rains. A total of 68 species are known to inhabit Louisiana alone. Products such as 6-12 and OFF were a help, but campers like the Scouts, needed to take along a "mosquito barre" made of toole for their tents.  There was also a smoke repellant that was a coil that burned at one end, incense, called PIC. For bites already received, there was the old New Orleans stand-by: Dr. Tichenor's Antiseptic.

I remember riding on my bike in our neighborhood in New Orleans, and being followed by a black COLUMN of the horrid things! I was not the only one upset by the swarms:  The fish and birds that once kept these insects in check had themselves been victims of Man's Final Solution for the mosquito.

The pendulum swung the other way, now.

This airborne pestilence had grown so in numbers by the mid-Sixties that a Mosquito Task Force was created in New Orleans to combat the winged creatures. A fleet of army jeeps was outfitted with a modified smoke generator, the smoke being laced with insecticide. These vehicles spread out into every neighborhood and subdivision.

I remember the first time I heard this strange bussing noise of motors, went outside to investigate, and looked out to see a dense fog coming toward me. It was impossible to see, and breathing was difficult, too. And the stuff smelled AWFUL! It was hard to tell if the mosquitoes were being sprayed - or WE were!

These implements of aggravation and contrivances of consternation came to be a common sight during the summer months of the second half of the 1960's. Whenever we saw or heard one of these contraptions coming, we would head indoors ASAP, and shut all the windows and doors. Nobody gave them a second thought: the mosquitoes were getting under control. We were happy.

JUNE 29, 1967

It was early morning - about 3:00am, according to eyewitnesses. The car was on US Highway 90, coming from the east at a high rate of speed. It was going so fast, they said,  that the car was causing sparks as its undercarriage bounced on the uneven Highway 90 pavement, scraping it.

What happened next was recorded in the New Orleans Times Picayune Newspaper, and I read the sad headlines the next day of how one of the most beautiful and fmous movie stars of the day, Jayne Mansfield, was killed in that horrible wreck.

It became readily apparent that speed was a major factor in the accident. Miss Mansfield's driver was very careless in not driving slower. However, the investigation later concluded that a mosquito fogger, operating during those wee hours of the morning, not only contributed to, but was a leading cause of the crash.

As a result, fogging procedures were later changed, more warnings were posted, and, with the construction of Interstate 10, the old US Hwy. 90 became just another strip of asphalt and concrete used by local traffic.

Eventually, airplanes would fly over the city, spraying newer, more potent chemicals. We were controlling the mosquito - but at what price? Who knows what future effects these pesticides might have on beneficial insects, such a honey bees, or on the animals, such as birds, --- or on the people?

 ________________________

Despite all of Man's best efforts to combat the lowly mosquito, and despite all the harm Man has done to the environment and to himself in an effort to eradicate the pest, the last time I went outside to check on the mosquito, he was still there!