.
"At every turn they are terrorized by jungle creatures: red ants, alligators, and a plague of insects
called la manta blanca, which sets upon them shortly before their food runs out and they
surrender to the guerrillas in despair:
It covered us like snow, spreading over our clothes and into our skin, inflicting painful bites that
we could not avoid. La manta blanca was a compact cloud of microscopic pearl-colored midges
with diaphanous wings. It was hard to believe that these fragile things, so clumsy in flight, could
inflict such painful bites…. We had to retreat and take the path to the river earlier than planned.
We plunged with relief into its warm water, scratching our faces with our nails to free ourselves
from the last relentless insects chasing us."
by Ingrid Betancourt, translated from the French by Alison Anderson, with the collaboration of Sarah Llewellyn
 |
| Ingrid Betancourt soon after her release - elation, relief and gratitude. |
The power of reading:
I came across this description of midge attacks in the jungles of Amazon on
Ingrid Betancourt and her fellow escapees during some of their failed escape
attempts from their imprisonment by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia. I can now fully appreciate the horrors of this particular event, having
experienced an unusual incidence of some midges at our place in Sydney. We
were quite upset about the onslaught of these tiny pesky insects that we hadn't
had here before: they just kept on hovering around us, occasionally managing to
bite, causing these totally itchy bits lasting for days.
Well, about the benefits of reading: I now can put our discomfort into
perspective. We only had maybe a dozen of them, and they seem to have
disappeared now, and our bite discomfort has settled by now.
I found the following post on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Services) news
site from 2008 (it was a full moon during the 'attacks' we encountered):
Full moon brings midge plague to Darwin
Posted
People in the Top End are being warned to stay away from mangroves
during the next week because of a plague of midges.
Midges don't transmit disease to humans, but scratching the bites until the skin
breaks can lead to infection.
A spokesman for the Territory's Centre for Disease Control, Peter Whelan, says
midges will be in plague proportions around Darwin and Palmerston for about a
week.
"Three days before the full moon and three days after the full moon is when
we're going to have high numbers of these midges and the highest numbers of
the midges of this particular species occur in September and October.
"So we're expecting a fairly big plague of these midges."
He says the itchiness is caused by the insects' saliva.
"They probe around in your skin making a little pool of blood and then they suck
that blood up.
"To get that blood flowing, they have to inject saliva with an anticoagulant.
"And it's those foreign sort of proteins in their saliva that they put into that skin
that's causing the reaction."
An Update on the 27th of December, from Sydney Morning Herald:
Midges have a bite on the town
Frontline ... chickens are guinea pigs in tests for mosquito-borne viruses. Photo: Jason South
SANDFLY bites are an annual holiday hazard for which many campers along the coast are well prepared.
But unsuspecting Sydneysiders are also finding their legs coming up in itchy red spots and blisters this summer from the tiny blood-sucking midges that have thrived in the city with the recent rain.
Martyn Robinson, a naturalist at the Australian Museum, is among those who have suffered.
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He has encountered the insects in his backyard, in the Stony Range Flora Reserve near Dee Why and across town at the Mount Annan Botanic Garden near Campbelltown.
''I've been bitten in all three places,'' he said.
Although he has not carried out a microscopic examination of the perpetrators to confirm their identity, he said the bites had all the hallmarks of sandflies.
In his experience, this kind of ''mini outbreak'' in the city is a once-in-a-decade event.
Sandflies, which are correctly known as biting midges, are most common around coastal lagoons, estuaries, mangrove swamps and tidal flats.
They lay their eggs in mud, decaying leaf litter and damp soil. For the larvae that hatch to thrive and turn into pupae, there must be a high moisture content in the surrounding area.
Mr Robinson said that recent rain had saturated the soil across Sydney, apparently allowing the midges to spread beyond their traditional habitats.
Their life cycle takes between three and 10 weeks, and it is the female adults that feed on our blood to obtain protein to produce eggs.
Sandflies usually stay near their breeding grounds.
''But whenever there is wind blowing from the east you get some blowing inland,'' Mr Robinson said. ''If they find suitable conditions to lay eggs, they will.''
People who live in sandfly-infested areas build up some immunity, and so it is tourists and newcomers to an area who are usually most affected, the department of medical entomology at Westmead Hospital said.
Some sensitive people can develop severe local reactions and blisters that can last days or even weeks, and they may require treatment with antihistamines. A cold snap or dry conditions could spell the end for roving sandflies.
Meanwhile, scientists are placing a flock of chickens around 10 northern Victorian towns under a government-funded program to test for the spread of mosquito-borne viruses.
The chickens are being bitten by south-bound mosquitoes and scientists will check them for such viruses as Barmah forest virus and the potentially fatal Murray Valley encephalitis.
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