There are more than 100 trillion mosquitoes cruising around the planet, including swarm annoying folks who live around the Black Creek salt marsh, and all of them are looking to suck your blood.

This week, some residents around Miracle Beach and the salt marsh, told CBC News they were “prisoners in their own homes” and that it was “like an apocalypse.”

One woman said, “We also have cancer-causing [mosquito repellant] that we’re spraying on our children in mass quantities,” she said.

Decafnation isn’t convinced of the wisdom of that, but after reading author Timothy C. Winegard’s description in a New York Times article of what a mosquito actually does, extreme measures don’t seem out of line.

“She gently lands on your ankle and inserts two serrated mandible cutting blades and saws into your skin, while two other retractors open a passage for the proboscis. With this straw she sucks your blood, while a sixth needle pumps in saliva that contains an anticoagulant that prevents blood from clotting. This shortens her feeding time, lessening the likelihood that you splat her across your ankle.”

Yuck.

If you’re lucky, all the mosquito leaves behind is an itchy bump. If you’re not, the little bugger could have infected you with malaria, West Nile, Zika, dengue or Yellow Fever, and you could be dead. Winegard says mosquitoes kill 700,000 people every year and may have killed half of the 108 billion humans who have ever lived.

The Miracle Beach folks are getting a taste of mosquito nastiness that refugees from eastern Canada have endured for centuries.

One of the great things about living on the west coast has always been the absence of insects, especially the blood-sucking kind. But changing climate conditions have encouraged mosquitoes — and probably other species as well — to seek out the O blood types (their favorite) of Canadians chillin’ on the coast.

Welcome to our new reality.

— When Comox Valley kids return to classrooms in September, schools are supposed to know who has been immunized and who hasn’t. The province’s new Vaccination Status Reporting Regulation went into effect July 1.

Under the new immunization registry requirements, all parents and guardians must submit their children’s vaccination records before they can enter public schools.

Recent outbreaks of measles in BC should remind us that deadly viruses never completely disappear.

Measles was declared eradicated in 2000. But there has been increasing numbers of confirmed cases recently. The resurgence of a disease that not long ago was killing nearly half a million people annually around the world, stresses the importance to remain vigilant about vaccinations.

In particular, parents must continue to immunize their children.

Health experts estimate that immunizations have prevented more than 103 million cases of contagious diseases in the last 100 years. Vaccines eliminated smallpox, which killed more than 500 million people. Before the whooping cough vaccine was created in 1940, more than 10,000 people were dying every year from the disease in North America.
Parents who don’t immunize their children are gambling on more than their own child’s risk of contracting highly communicable diseases. They are putting others at risk, too, including children medically ineligible for immunization and cancer patients on chemotherapy.

— Mike Fournier, a former Fifth Street sports shop owner and one of the driving forces behind the original Comox Valley Search and Rescue team, has contacted Decafnation with an update on the mysterious disappearance of a hiker in Strathcona Park back in 1977. Two weeks ago, we posted a story about that strange occurrence of events and said that the hiker, Duane Bressler, was never found.

But it turns out we didn’t look deep enough into the old Comox District Free Press archives. Fournier contacted us to say the Bressler’s body was eventually found, more than a year after he disappeared. Some hikers in the area of Mt. Septimus and Green Lake provided a tip that led the SAR team to the steep cliffs between Price Creek and Green Lake.

You can read the story here.

One of Decafnation’s regular contributors, Pat Carl, struck a nerve with her report this week on a visit to TimberWest’s logging operations around the Cruickshank River. Her article reported on the devastation she observed in the Comox Valley’s source of drinking water.

And that set off long strings of comments on Decafnation and on various Facebook pages. Some defenders of logging in the Comox Lake Watershed wrote wearily long diatribes that included attacks on Carl and this website, and those spoke for themselves.

The fact remains that logging above Comox Lake is a major reason why taxpayers are funding a $120-plus million water treatment plant.

But it’s not the only factor.

In fact, the Comox Lake Watershed Plan highlights camping, swimming and hiking as activities just as hazardous to the watershed as timber harvesting.

And that raises the question of whether Comox Lake should be a no-go conservation area that prohibits ATVs, dogs and fossil-fuel spilling motorboats.

— Short update to Comox Mayor Russ Arnott’s chilling attempt to stifle free speech by ordering the Nautical Days parade marshall to rescind her approval of a Mack Laing Heritage Society float. Arnott justified his dictate by referring to many complaints of “alarming and inappropriate behaviour” by Mack Laing supporters in the Courtenay Canada Day parade.

But checking with the Courtenay parade marshall, Scott Mossing, reveals a different story.

Mossing says, “I can confirm that I have not received nor have any complaints regarding Mack Laing Heritage Society’s involvement in the July 1st Parade.”

It makes you wonder where Arnott got his information.

— The Courtenay-Comox Sewage Commission will reconsider on Tuesday a request from the Curtis Road Residents Association to add the Area B representation to their deliberations.

Odours from the sewage treatment plant have plagued Curtis Road homeowners for more than 30 years and, despite some improvements from new technology, still isn’t acceptable to them. Besides the loss of enjoyment of their homes at certain times, the strong odours have also significantly devalued their properties.

At its last meeting, the Comox Valley Regional District board pushed the CRRA’s request back to the sewage commission for reconsideration.

The commission previously couldn’t decide, with a vote to allow Area B representation ending in a tie because the CFB Comox delegate missed the meeting. Courtenay directors were in favour of allowing representation in some form, but Comox directors were not.

The CFB delegate may not show up again. The Department of Defense doesn’t like getting tangled in local politics, so it’s possible the military delegate will avoid this meeting, too.

But even with a deciding vote present, directors might choose to wait for the much-anticipated staff report and recommendations emanating from last year’s omnibus report on governance of the regional district’s water and sewage commissions.

The governance study was commissioned after CVRD engineers scrapped a plan about two years ago to patch the current sewerage system that included building a new pump station in the neighbourhood of Croteau Beach. There were serious technical problems with that plan and considerable public push-back.

—The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report this week that blames agriculture for rising temperatures and the release of greenhouse gases. More specifically, the report says how we produce our food is a large part of the climate change problem.

And if we don’t change the way we eat, the report predicts the instability of our global food supply.

Short summary: eating less meat equals less heat. Agriculture generates 44 percent of all methane gas emissions and up to 37 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gases. Agriculture leads to deforestation.

The report recommends encouraging diets based on plants and grains, which take less land to produce than meat. And they have specific recommendations to improve food production’s negative effects on the environment.