Keep-Well Stories for Little Folks

by May Farinholt Jones

Don't you remember when we had chills last summer and Uncle John had to come to see us and give us some medicine? Mother says that was because some grown mosquito had bitten a person who had chills, and while sucking that person's blood the mosquito had sucked into her bill some malaria poison; then later when she bit us, she punched some of that poison into our blood, while she was getting a supper from our blood. The mosquito's bill is as sharp as one of Uncle John's knives.

Mother told me that a long time ago, when the English came to Virginia, they settled at Jamestown, and they were afraid of the Indians, the bears, and the panthers that could hide in the forest near-by.

The English did not know it, but they had a more deadly enemy then at Jamestown than the Indians and the panthers. This enemy was so small they could not see it, and then, too, they had not learned about it as we are learning now. This enemy was the little germ or parasite that causes malaria.

Mother says that it is easy to fight an enemy when it is out in the open. The settlers knew only that many of their people got sick and died. This was because there were many mosquitoes there, and these mosquitoes bit them, and put these poisonous enemies into their blood. But they did not know that the mosquitoes were the cause of the great number of deaths in the colony.

All this happened many years ago. I believe the English thought their old enemy, the Dragon, of which they had heard so much, but which they could not see, had come to this new land.

We can know the mosquito that carries malaria because she looks as if she is trying to stand on her head when she lights on anything. It seems queer that the female mosquito is the only one which poisons us with malaria. Perhaps the male mosquito cannot bite, because he has so many feathery plumes on his bill.

The mosquito and the germ of malaria, which is carried from one person to another, killed far more white people than the Indians or the wild animals did.

Not many years ago, a very clever man found out that the mosquito carried malaria, for, without her, the germs could never get into our blood.

Mother says that the way for us to stop malaria is for us to kill all the mosquitoes, and the best way to kill them off is to do so when they are little "wiggle-tails" or "wigglers." She says the best way of all, though, is never to have any standing water around where the mosquito can lay her eggs.