"The mosquitos go crazy, hungry for blood..."
Posted: Sun Jun 15, 2014 4:45 pm
In London,
An Underground Home
For The World’s Mosquitoes
Ari Shapiro / NPR
You can't hear it over the noise of London's traffic. But it's there. That faint, whining hum. Right under my feet, thousands of mosquitoes are dining on human blood.
To visit them, you have to go through a sliding glass door into the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This school started as a hospital on the Thames River, where doctors treated sailors returning from faraway places with strange parasites.
Today, the building holds countless exotic diseases that you hope you'll never catch. The mosquitoes carry just a few of them, and their keeper is an entomologist named Dr. James Logan.
To get to them, you have to go underground, then through two sets of doors and a net, and into the restricted access room.
"We don't want any mosquitoes to escape onto the streets of London, obviously, because we've got tropical mosquitoes here," says Logan.
. . .
Clear plastic boxes line the walls, each one holding hundreds of mosquitoes. Some are from Pakistan, others from Tanzania. There are mosquitoes that can carry West Nile virus and Dengue Fever.
The really dangerous ones live in a different room though. When you jostle a box, the mosquitoes go crazy, hungry for blood.
. . .
Malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. This lab is doing research that could help lower that number. It's the reason people call Dr. Logan the mosquito slayer.
He cultivates these insects to learn how better to obliterate them on a massive scale.
COMPLETE STORY
An Underground Home
For The World’s Mosquitoes
Ari Shapiro / NPR
You can't hear it over the noise of London's traffic. But it's there. That faint, whining hum. Right under my feet, thousands of mosquitoes are dining on human blood.
To visit them, you have to go through a sliding glass door into the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This school started as a hospital on the Thames River, where doctors treated sailors returning from faraway places with strange parasites.
Today, the building holds countless exotic diseases that you hope you'll never catch. The mosquitoes carry just a few of them, and their keeper is an entomologist named Dr. James Logan.
To get to them, you have to go underground, then through two sets of doors and a net, and into the restricted access room.
"We don't want any mosquitoes to escape onto the streets of London, obviously, because we've got tropical mosquitoes here," says Logan.
. . .
Clear plastic boxes line the walls, each one holding hundreds of mosquitoes. Some are from Pakistan, others from Tanzania. There are mosquitoes that can carry West Nile virus and Dengue Fever.
The really dangerous ones live in a different room though. When you jostle a box, the mosquitoes go crazy, hungry for blood.
. . .
Malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. This lab is doing research that could help lower that number. It's the reason people call Dr. Logan the mosquito slayer.
He cultivates these insects to learn how better to obliterate them on a massive scale.
COMPLETE STORY