PARIS – In Beijing and Tokyo, it was the COVID plague. In Rio, it was the Zika virus. In Paris it’s the — SMACK — mosquitoes.
Which admittedly is not a huge vexation. Because, well, Paris. But annoying.
And, if too much heed is paid to the scientific experts — which we adamantly refuse to do — it can drive a person round the bend. The oracles of doom are all the time warning about this looming disaster and that looming disaster. OK, they were right about the coronavirus.
Yay, you. That’s a once-in-a-century phenomenon, maybe. But the sci-guys have been issuing alerts about dengue fever since months before the began, wringing their hands especially over what could happen when the Games got underway and some 15 million tourists descended on the capital, not to mention the many athletes from endemic dengue countries in Africa.
Why, there could be a dengue-fever super-spreader out there. In a city with hardly any air-conditioning, including my hotel room, it’s impossible to keep at arms length. Windows have to be flung open to get some air flowing.
And the pests have been particularly luxuriating in the hot, wet weather of these past few weeks. Dengue fever is spread by the African tiger mosquito, a bloodsucking bugger that buzzed and whined — you know the incoming sound — up into Europe at the turn of the millennium. It’s capable of transmitting five viruses: West Nile, chikungunya, Usutu, Zika and dengue.
Between January and April, France reported 1,679 im.