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Aw, Professor: Mosquitos

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  In honor of reactive management styles. Mosquitos carry dread diseases worldwide, most notably diseases endemic in the tropics, such as malaria and dengue. When I travel to the tropics, I pay a lot of attention to those diseases and the critters that carry them. Where I live in southern New England, we pay attention to mosquitos only when a case of Eastern Equine Encephalitis is diagnosed -- EEE or Triple-E. Then we go from zero to overkill in a matter of days. Parks are closed and aerial bombardment of our towns commences.  Boards of health try to communicate both that the sprays are safe and that we should stay indoors when they are being sprayed. Hmmm. They also encourage what Brazilians call "meia e meia" practices, which means staying indoors at dusk and dawn. The Portuguese phrase literally means "half and half" or "six and six" because in the Amazon, mosquitos are most active at those hours, and Brazilian Portuguese refers to six on the clock as m