It Could Happen Here - Mosquitoes!

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

James and Shereen discuss the most deadly animal on earth, ways to avoid being eaten alive, and efforts at mosquito eradicationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. CallZone Media Should we do a musky turn noise to the intro? How do we do that? Like buzzzzzzzz We don't do buzzzzzz. that's why you get a bit you can't hear them okay okay yeah yeah here we are that's it that's the introduction that's all you're getting and and you will be grateful for it it's it's me and shireen hi shireen hi james hi shireen

what are we are we doing vegetables today? Are we doing genocide? Which part of the vegetable to genocide spectrum are we on? I feel like we're closer to vegetable than genocide. But you can argue the opposite as well, because I get eaten alive by these things. So I don't know. I think we're kind of in the middle here. I think it's a good even middle. Yeah, we've really split the difference. Look at us go. i think it's a good even middle yeah yeah we've already split the difference look at us go yeah yeah it's right it's things that eat shireen alive uh today is flesh eating

bacteria day uh it's not it does not have a flesh eating bacteria off the episode i thought we were doing yeah yeah i like to surprise you sometimes just see how you react we're doing mosquitoes actually shireen mosquitoes yep yep little guys little friendly guys who they're not friendly and they're not always little but yeah some of them are absolute chonks yeah i've seen some some big dogs recently did you know uh the mosquito shireen is the most deadly animal in the world really yeah it's an animal yeah i mean it's in the animal kingdom right like suppose it's an insect a nuisance no it, I mean, it's in the animal kingdom, right? I suppose. It's an insect? What a nuisance. No, it's not an insect.

It's not an animal. It's a nuisance. I guess I didn't realize it was considered the most deadly animal. Why is that? Just from, like, malaria? Yeah, and all the other diseases it vectors, right? It can do parasites, bacteria, and viruses. So it's really like a triple threat.

You can get, like, chukungunya, dengue. I've got a whole list of them. Why are they still around? That is an interesting question, Sh dengue. I've got a whole list of them. Why are they still around? That is an interesting question, Shireen. I've always wondered that. Bees have benefits. They're cute little guys and they make honey and they just want to pollinate around. Lots of mosquitoes do too.

Lots of them also, or they don't make honey. Lots of species of mosquito just feed off flowers. They're not out there to get you. It is just the lady mosquitoes of certain species it's always the lady insects man it's the the queen bee yeah it's the black widow i don't know yeah it's it's true yeah it's uh i guess maybe they're a matriarchal society you know and they're like yeah i guess technically a spider is not an insect right it's like a arachnid yeah i don't want someone to correct me on the reddit yeah yeah

please please post your genus and species stuff on their on their reddit i would love that so yeah you get mosquitoes they're stacking some bunnies about three quarters of a million people a year in fact which is which is quite a lot of people for those of you yeah i guess we're closer to the genocide in this on the spectrum yeah yeah yeah yeah sadly i know the mosquitoes don't have so much agency so i don't feel like they're quite as like evil you know the word of course uh a mosca the mosca is a fly in spanish and then you're saying of course like why i don't know that yeah i don't know that you know i don't know i that. No, I don't know that. I'm just going to look this up. Mosquitoes or origin word.

Una mosca is a fly. Ito is a diminutive ending. So it means like a little fly. Oh, little fly. Yeah. A flylet. And there's also a Spanish word that means long-legged. Hold on.

From mosquito. The Spanish call the mosquitoes mosquetas. And the native Hispanic Americans call them zancudos. Mosquito is Spanish or Portuguese, and it means little fly, while zancudos is a Spanish word that means long-legged. Ah, okay. There we go. I'm learning the etymology today. Yeah, I learned.

I didn't know that. I just had little fly based on it being little fly in Spanish. I mean, that's kind of cute. Yeah, I like the long-legged. Well, we have daddy long legs, I guess he's a mosquito yeah so technically mosquitoes are actually micro predators which is kind of a fun word i feel like i've met some micro predators in my time uh but they were not mosquitoes and uh that is because some of them thrive by drinking human blood tell me about it yeah that is the Shireen, that you have encountered mosquitoes.

So I want to talk first about their life cycle and then about their predation on Shireen. So mosquitoes lay their eggs in stagnant water. That's water that's not moving, right? I know some things, James. Okay, okay. Not everyone knows about stagnant water, Shireen. There are listeners too they might not know so their eggs hatch into lava and the lava become

pupa these stages are all aquatic right they all happen in the stagnant water right and then the adult mosquito hatches from the pupa and uh it hatches on the surface and then it flies off and it fucks up your evening i didn't realize they had anything to do with water yeah that's why like did this not happen in la um a few years ago they this council was like sending people around san diego to like scope out your garden to see if you had standing water i don't remember if that did happen i have no memory but it was during like peak yeah let's see uh maybe that's why like it was peak like zika panic oh that makes sense that that would happen yeah yeah it does and we definitely get them like i have to put a little uh oviside like a thing that kills the eggs into my chicken water

if i'm having a big standing thing of chicken water yeah i try and have smaller and i refresh it more frequently now uh but yeah you definitely have to be careful of stagnant water and as we'll see like one of the main ways to control them is like limiting the amount of water for some species only the females of those species are the blood suckers and in some cases they don't need the blood and in other cases to lay their eggs they need to have a blood meal as it's called which is a nice word that's unsettling okay yeah so the mosquitoes that are vectors for human diseases so they're like the transportation vector vehicle for the disease between one person another those are the guys who often need a little blood meal to lay their eggs they don't only attack people

actually uh they sort of have a preferred species but they're in a pinch they'll go after anything with blood and like i've seen them get really thick on cattle and stuff in the summer or horses yeah i can imagine that yeah because cows just sit there i mean if they're being mosquito attacked they get pissed off but it's only so much they can do in some cases i think um it's horses equine encephalitis is spread by mosquitoes so like they can actually get it they can get diseases from two terrible little guys and they can like literally die uh from being overbitten and if they get like completely swarmed on wow yeah that's like if they're unable to get away from them because if you have a water tank right and then mosquitoes are breeding in a tank it's where you want to

keep that tank moving like right so it's not stagnant water because stagnant water means it's not moving there you go look at that shireen putting knowledge into action i love that for you it's like one of those duolingo things where you learn a word then use it in a sentence exactly all i do is use that word yeah yeah so yeah mosquitoes come out at dawn or dusk which is to say they are crepuscular another word that everyone already knows i mean i did learn that word i did like an audiobook and i had to look this word up and so no i know what it means only because of that but it's a very interesting word i will say it is isn't it sounds like creepy like i i would have

no idea what it meant if i didn't look it up like there's nothing that clues me in yeah crepuscular it sounds like yeah kind of gross because like diurnal nocturnal you can kind of if you know one you can work out the other but crepuscular just coming out of fucking left field that's crepuscular does that mean which remind me it means that they're active dawn and dusk or that they're eating don i think it means that they're active dawn and dusk or that they're eating dawn and dusk? I think it means that they, yeah, they are. I'm not actually sure if it means they're active or they're eating. That's a good question.

Because I feel like I've heard cats are also described as that. Yeah, cats are definitely that way. Animal appearing active in twilight. Active in twilight. Wow, that's very poetic. The first animal I see here is a cat. Yeah. Lion, American woodcock, fire firefly short-eared owl cool

yeah the real uh pantheon of animals so they do the feeding at dawn or dusk and they actually use compounds in your exhale breath to sniff you out so they are they are hunting for people and they specifically prefer to feed on people who have type o blood a abundance of skin bacteria high body heat and pregnant women if you fit one or all of those criteria i guess there's that because people like definitely i feel like i have type o blood yeah me too i feel like i'm victimized like uh more than most people by the mosquito and they choose me yeah i feel like me and my mom are both type o and we get you know live so that makes sense yeah they somehow they can smell that on you i'm always cold though so i don't think i

have high body heat not always cold but i can i don't know i have bad circulation i'm not pregnant i guess i must have an abundance of skin yeah it's gonna be your skin bacteria they're doing it shireen by process of deduction no but typo makes sense i think like that is enough i suppose yeah they uh because they're like when it's a lot of them you know and when they're one of them starts feeding on you that's going to trigger more of them to come feeding on you how because they're like look at this this idiot let's go feed off yeah yeah like look at this all this delicious blood that is typo yeah got it yum yum yum and then they're giving off their little feeding sort of vibes um and then other mosquitoes come

which can be useful to trap them but that's a fair point the trapping of mosquitoes as i learned when i was doing this very fucking interesting interesting, actually. Ooh, okay, tell me more. Actually, maybe not now, but whenever you get to it. Yeah, we'll get to it soon. They have a very interesting set of mouth parts, including the labium, which is like a gutter-shaped tube, mouth tube, I guess. And it's super sharp, and they can use it to soar through your skin painlessly.

So that's why you don't feel. So that's the needle-looking thing. Yeah. That's like the little like thing they poke you with and then well they they do that then they have little needle looking things that kind of that it contained within the gutter shape that they use to suck out your blood gross their saliva stops your blood from clotting and it prevents vascular constriction in the area where they're biting so they can get a little bit extra blood before it clots i guess some people can become desensitized to their bites over time if you're getting bitten all the time others can become more sensitive and the increased sensitivity is known as skeeter syndrome skeeter syndrome

yeah i'll look this up and what what it looks like because i'm very sensitive to them okay maybe we've got two diagnoses in one episode. We've got skin bacteria and Skeeter syndrome. I don't know what I need to have to have Skeeter syndrome, but I will say I'm extremely sensitive to mosquito bites. When I get bitten, they become gigantic. I won't itch them because I know not to at this point, but I'll get these gigantic welts, essentially, and they're bright pink. And then over the course of like a

week or something they become bright red and they look like someone put paint on my leg it's like it's a crazy color of of red and then when they eventually do stop itching i'll have that welt there and that red mark for like months damn months it's like it becomes like this weird scar yeah you could be a skito syndrome i guess so yeah yeah i will say when i was a kid in syria when we would go visit there um they have so many mosquitoes i got in alive because we'd go there in the summer too but there was one time i got bitten on my eyelid like this that sucks and so i genuinely couldn't open my eye for like a week and a half that was the worst one i think i'm like that with bee stings like they uh they they swell up like crazy like i

don't think i'm like uh anaphylactic but a couple of times one time i was racing in laguna seca which is like a car racing track in monterey and uh i'm racing along and i guess i'm riding along with my mouth open uh just like you know thriving and uh a mosquito flew in and bit me i don't know mosquito a bee and my whole face just was like in your mouth yeah it was crazy it was bad shit james yeah it was fucked um one had just stung me before like the extent to which i swell up when bee stung me i got stung in the leg on a training ride and i had to upgrade to like xl shorts because like my thigh just become like elephant isis man yeah um and then one got me in the mouth yeah it was a bad day i had epi pain i had uh i think i had some

ivy benadryl at some point oh yeah it was fucking wow i mean i i'm glad you're not anaphylactic but that's pretty close i guess yeah yeah it's better close you can get one time i got i got stung in a face when i was trying to go to lecture as well and uh like walked in with like elephant man face and my students were just like dude it's like those photos or videos you see of like animals like a dog at a to b and their face is like gigantic yeah yeah it is uh it's dogs do love to eat beans i will say i don't know if you've ever done 23andme but i did it years and years ago for another show i was on and on 23andme you can select if you want like health traits as well as like ancestral traits or whatever.

And on that, it said I'm more likely to get bitten by mosquitoes. Maybe it just knew your blood type. But I didn't give them my blood, I gave them my spit. I don't know, yeah, that's crazy. Maybe there's something in your spit that tells you your blood type? I don't know. We've just discovered that Shereen was on a eugenics podcast. No, it was for my podcast.

That was about ethnicity. Okay, yeah. Some real problematic folks do love uh 23andme it's very funny when the white nationalists go on 23andme and find out something it upsets them yeah i love that it is always fun to see so the real problem with mosquitoes is not just that they make you atrial but they're vectors for disease and they infect 700 million people a year with their little bitey mouths they can spread all kinds of diseases including viruses parasites and bacteria some of their greatest hits include yellow fever dengue malaria tularemia zika chukungunya and west nile virus speaking from experience some of those are really shit and you are best avoiding all of those uh

that's going to be my advice to you as a doctor in modern european history it really fucking sucks to get some of these i've uh i've had some diseases from some mosquitoes and i would not recommend yeah the mosquitoes don't actually get sick themselves uh and it's like its immune system can destroy the virus but um if if it bites someone else and then bites you before its immune system destroys the virus's genetic code, you can get sick. And some parasites, apparently malaria, can make mosquitoes more apt to go biting. Interesting. It kind of turns them into zombie brain mosquitoes. That's how I like to think about it.

With malaria, which is kind of the main mosquito vector disease i guess that we think about uh the parasite replicates in the liver cells and then moves about by the bloodstream if you get bitten again the blood could then pass that malaria to the next victim of the mosquito i'm going on a trip soon for work uh i'll probably be on it when you all hear this and like because people are traveling more these different diseases are becoming more common right because they're endemic in one area and then people come from that area to another area and then mosquitoes are hopping around when they're in a new area that they're now spreading in that area so uh i was talking to some folks like on the areas where migrants

travel north all the types of malaria are now currently present which is great uh because you've got people from all over the world right and then the mosquitoes are hopping from someone from china to someone who's come from right mauritania and and uh spreading their little mosquito vector diseases around so that is bad do you know what else is bad um i'm sorry. My mind went so blank. But ads are not good. No, no, they're not bad. Ads are great. Ads are so good. Yeah, we love them.

Yay, ads. Woo. know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and

admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts

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Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Okay, we're back. And I want to talk about how we stop the mosquito menace. Please, help. So I'm going to talk about eliminating them, and then I'm going to talk about how we stop the mosquito menace. Please, help. So I'm going to talk about eliminating them, and then I'm going to talk about some products and services, actually,

that you can avail yourself of. I've been thinking about this a lot recently for work reasons. Right. Yeah, doing some jungle travel in the next few months. So how do we prevent them from biting us? First of all, we can stop them having little useful pools of stagnant water to replicate in right like this means like if you're like me one of my friends refers to my my garden as a quote alaska yard which i think is it is a way of saying that it's a mess and there

are lots of like car parts and uh like little little things that i i'm fixing soon you know and i guess having an alaska yard is bad for the mosquitoes like especially things like tires right like you know if you have a big car tire water pools in there and they can have a little breed in there same as buckets um in marshy areas what people do is they dig ditches that allows water to move so the water doesn't sit completely still and then introducing certain fish it can also help certain fish will eat including the mosquito fish will eat the larva of the mosquito okay tilapia also do this so like you can have a nice little if you're a person who eats fish

a nice little situation where you're reducing the disease burden and also like providing a food source which is something they're working on that you can drain swamps of course donald trump famously has drained the swamp. Right, yeah, what a hero. No malaria in D.C. anymore because of Donald Trump. But doing so obviously destroys an important habitat. So you don't want to just be draining swamps. I was reading about something in Florida they do called rotational impound management,

where they kind of allow water levels to fluctuate. And then they have these clever little gates that mean that other species, like the fish and the crustaceans can move about but they're keeping the water moving to stop the little mosquito eggs from forming the other way to do it is to try and kill them right so there are various ways of doing it one of them is to create an environment where they would want to lay their eggs but then have that environment kill their eggs so there are there are various at home ways of doing this so like you could like make a stagnant water thing and then blitz up the eggs or filter them out or you can put

things called oversides in there which kill the eggs some of them also kill the mosquitoes when they come and lay their eggs you can also use their little hunting senses against them right so you can create an environment that attracts them either by seeming like a person or by seeming like a good place for them to breed. And then you can filter out the eggs from where they lay them, right? Or you can kill them when they come on in. There are things called lava sides. Maybe that's what I'm using with my chicken thing, actually. They destroy the lava.

They're just like little bricks that you dissolve in your water. And there are some pretty low- risk insecticides that you can use and there are also high risk insecticides or at least under popular insecticides and this is where a friend of the of the cool zone media network ddt comes in are you familiar with ddt shereen no they're our friends yeah they're our friends we love ddt big appetizer on pod we love them because until about 60 years ago the u.s government fucking loved ddt right it's an insecticide they would put it in walls in mattresses people rubbed their pets with it for a while people thought it treated polio they would even go through towns spraying down whole neighborhoods with DDT.

And people kind of became aware that DDT actually isn't a great idea, both for ecological and health reasons. About 60 years ago, Rachel Carson published a book called Silent Spring. It's kind of one of the foundational texts of the modern environmental movement. And I think people often credit Rachel Carson with being the only person that that's not necessarily true like you can look at migrant farm workers actually and see that they have been for a long time being like uh i don't think it's great that you're dosing us with this pesticide all the time like maybe maybe stop spraying us right uh with the ddt stop playing the places i want to quote a really good piece that are in the new republic on ddt we now know that DDT causes tumours in mice and rats.

It thins birds' eggs to the point that mothers inadvertently crush their gestating offspring. It may disrupt birds' sense of orientation, sending them out to sea to die. It fundamentally alters the reproductive organs of an array of critters. It can poison animals even decades after spraying has ended. Further, a growing body of evidence has linked ddt to numerous forms of cancer in humans especially breast cancer studies have shown how the levels of ddt in our bodies track inequalities in human society for instance there are higher ddt levels in black people than in whites and higher levels in poor people than in rich ones sounds

like you were lying to me when you said that they're our friends yeah i feel like within the cool zone media network of making podcasts about evil shit uh the ddt i think fits perfect that's terrible yeah it's terrible there's there's recently like a resurgence in i guess like people standing ddt again and then questioning some of it like research around it but we know for sure that it's ecologically damaging right and what we don't know is the consequences of wiping out a bunch of species in the ecosystem so we probably don't want to use ddt one thing we can do to kill them is introduce predators which is kind of cool tilapia is one predator dragonflies are another i love a dragonfly big interesting flies so in

bikini faso they're working on a fungus with a mosquito specific neurotoxin which is kind of cool it can just grow and kill the mosquitoes the world mosquito program is also trialing a bacteria that when mosquitoes carry it it amps up their immune system so like they kill the virus or the parasite or whatever it is right more quickly so then they're less likely to be vectors there's also programs which introduce male mosquitoes which are not able to have kids either they're sterile or they're breeding results in eggs that won't hatch so that's kind of interesting right trying to control the population that way and they also have these really interesting genetically

modified mosquitoes that need antibiotic tetracycline to grow so they raise a batch in the lab and gives them the tetracycline that they need right and then they let them out to breed and then when they breed because they young don't have tetracycline they don't grow and they don't make it it's really interesting to think about like some folks are advocating for completely eradicating them just wiping them off the face of the planet which would seem to have many benefits right with all these diseases that they vector i'm one of those people yeah you're a mosquito genocider i found this interesting thesis that they're like a forest defense mechanism against humans like if we look at that like the ecosystems way of uh being like get out of here yeah like leave this place

alone yeah which is interesting but like i know it's hard because the people who mostly die from mosquito vector diseases are the people with the least access to resources right right yeah like even things like you know when you're very sick with some of these things you you need to be you know kept hydrated and kept cool as your temperature gets up and stuff you don't have ac and maybe you can't get an iv or whatever like a very preventable death could occur right and so right it's hard real hard for me sitting in america to be like no we shouldn't but right i guess i understand that argument uh but if we go about it by fucking dousing whole areas in ddt again then that's not great either right that can have its uh that can that can have its downsides you know what else has its downside shereen what dreams it's having to pivot to ads every 10 to 15 minutes

in this job that we do so we're gonna do it now hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests

and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators,

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todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We are entering the final trimester of our podcast. And yeah, do you like that? I like to think of them as trimesters. The last slice of this little podcast cake for you guys. Yeah. So I wanted to present some little strategies that I like to use. Please.

When I am going to places where I am worried about being eaten alive by the little flies. Wait, okay. You see all these, like, DIY, like, this is how you attract mosquitoes somewhere else. But, like, none of those have been mentioned. So is that all bullshit? What do they talk me through? I don't know. I have to look it up.

But I feel like I've seen, like, little things where it's like, put this bucket of water here. Or, like, put, like, lemon or honey or, like, something to attract, like, general insects and then mosquitoes. Or, like, even, like, insects and then mosquitoes or like even like light can attract mosquitoes so you put like a light somewhere but this sounds all like bullshit now yeah you can do that you can even use a fan right because i don't see very good flyers like they uh you can just kind of blow them away from you uh so yeah in terms of like small scale mosquito prevention yeah i'm gonna get into some of those okay cool the most useful thing for me is mosquito nets actually so like in the jungle i like to sleep in a hammock this one called the

jungle desk uh that eagles nest outfitters make that has like a built-in mosquito net that's nice yeah it's really nice like i like it because i don't have to fuck around with like draping it and worry about like little gaps right yeah and i use that a lot i use a whole little system that they make and it's really nice if i'm in hotels c to summit makes a sleeping bag liner a i like to take a sleeping bag liner when i'm going places like i i got fucking fleas from a hotel bed in rwanda oh no yeah it was bad like if you think mosquito bites i had to try having and like i'm for people who haven't seen me i'm a hairy person like you have long hair and had a beard and fleas were just upon me and it was bad. So I like to take a little sleeping bag liner now that's treated with a mosquito repellent.

But it must be safe for skin and stuff though, right? Yeah, yeah. It's embedded in the fabric. It's called permethrin. We'll talk about it in a second. The last thing I use is a head bug net.'m a massive advocate for the the head bug net i know you look like a complete lemon but like it's just i don't like to be bitten in the face no i have been bitten in the face so yeah it's not fun yeah take it from shireen uh bite survivor if you have a brimmed hat it's much

nicer because it sort of hangs in front of your face then but i wear these all the time if you like to like see wildlife it's nice too because it's kind of camouflaging like it takes the glare off your face you get really bad insects up in scotland like when i've been out there in the summertime i've worn one and i wear a lot in california like there are some places i like to hike where we have year-round water here but it's definitely pretty gross by like the end of the summer you know like it's been sitting for a while but water is a big constraint on your on your hiking out here right so you kind of need it so i'll go down there and filter my water but i wear my little bug face net yeah and it works great i love it right so after that you can also do repellents they're these come in two forms there's a one that you put on your clothes

and the ones that you put on your body right the one that you put on your clothes is called permethrin the thing with permethrin is that it's a neurotoxin for cats which is very bad for cats so soya makes a little spray bottle of it and you can spray it on your own clothes and treat them right but if you have cats you have you must do this outside like you can't do it in your house with your cats it's safe once it's dry so like you can spray them let them be on your washing line or what have you and then uh and then when it's dry you can uh you can bring them aside then it's safe honestly like uh you can also send them off to a company i think it's called insect shield and they'll spray them for you and the way they do it somehow bonds it for much longer like normally it lasts for about six

washes but with them you can get like 10 times as many washes you can also buy shit uh like i just got a like a hoodie from a company called first light who make like fancy hunting stuff that has the insect stuff built in yeah i like that because then if you have a hoodie as well you can put you know you get like a lot of coverage but like if a cat like sat on this clothing it's fine now because it's bonded yeah your cat could like go curl up in it and have a sleep and things so even if it gets wet that's okay it's when the permethrin itself is wet the first application that's when it's risky okay i see i see if you're gonna do that you want to do your socks as well because they fucking love to bite around the ankles yep my legs are their their prime target yeah that's

their their favorite area to bite yeah i don't know why i mean they're probably easier to access and you're less likely to see them i suppose like and also i feel like if you're sitting you're moving probably your upper body more than your lower body so it's like i don't know yeah it's still they can sneak in there all bastards yeah so things to like repel them one of them is um have you seen the thermo cells are you familiar with them no there's a brand called off that makes them too it emits something called methafluthrin and methafluthrin is like a non-toxic i was looking at the epa guidelines for this it's mostly non-toxic it should be fine in your house but it is toxic to aquatic invertebrates fish and bees because with all these things i don't want to just be spraying an insecticide into the world right

like yeah and damaging like innocent non-micro predators so what the thermosol does you know when people have those little things in their houses where they put an essential oil in and it puffs and it makes your house smell nice yeah it's like that it's like that okay and uh it does that but with this methafluthrin and uh they work okay like if you're in your tent and stuff they work like they don't work if it's windy they don't really work. They can be nice. If you set them up and let them get going for a while and then come into a space, they can be really nice. And then you have other things like a fan.

You can have the electric traps, right? Which kind of bring them and electrocute them. How do those electric traps attract them? Just the light? I think it's the UV light because it has that really bright. I actually don't know, but I think they electrocute them when they land on it, right? Yeah, I think it's a uv light because yeah it has that really bright i actually don't know but i think they electrocute some like when they land on it right yeah i think it's the light yeah those seem to be like a more multi-purpose insect zapper though right so look i've not preferred those i don't

want to be killing everything else like just uh try and you know leave no trace and then the last thing is for some reason i've become obsessed with this recently the different creams you can put on yourself uh to stop mosquitoes going away ideally you can kind of layer up all the things right to limit you know like the amount of just chemicals you have to rub on your skin deep is the most popular one people are probably familiar with d it was developed by the u.s army in the 40s the big thing with deep is it's really hard on plastics so i i'm not a contact lens or glass wearer i don't know a contact lens is made of glass or plastic you're asking the wrong person man okay yeah i've i've worn both and i have no

idea i'm gonna say look at us with our perfect vision i've worn neither so i don't know i mean i don't think it's crazy if it was made out of glass or plastic right hold on what are contact lenses welcome to the portion of podcast where sherry googles i think i guess they are types of plastic but not the kind of plastic that comes to mind when you hear the word high-tech polymers that allow oxygen to flow through to reach the cornea body body blow so i guess yeah sure yeah be careful with your d okay actually there's a question that says are contacts glass or plastic so i guess i'm a dummy because that's a legitimate question no it's a good question that's just like sounds crazy to me anyway i don't know if the deep can get to them it can definitely oh yeah it does contact lenses there

we go uh it can damage your contact lenses it definitely will mess with your rain gear your tent your sunglasses especially in higher concentrations um so like deep you can get 10% deep you can get 100% deep you you get maximum protection at 30% deep so after that it's just uh you're buying yourself more time between applications also if it gets more concentrated you're risking damaging your gear and like i don't like the way it makes my mouth feel like with the spray if you spray it you get this like metallic dry mouth it seems like you're killing yourself when you uh you walk into a cloud of deep okay cool cool i like picardin it's a synthetic version of an element that's found in pepper plants yeah that's what i usually use when i go camping yeah their little um soya makes a really nice picard and actually it's got like a blue label on the bottle

yeah that's the one i use yeah yeah we like soya i got to try the reason i've suggested so many soya products is because uh the soya foundation were there in the marshall islands when i was there oh nice i mean i like their shit so yeah i do i think they're a really cool company actually they seem to make stuff that like solves problems and then just like keep making it they don't like make a new thing every year a different color and try and rehype it you know like uh right and they did really cool shit in the marshall islands it was cool to see and like yeah as companies go i think they're pretty round they also gave us some water filters to help with the migrants the other day uh which is very nice of them we uh We needed some water filters for folks crossing the border,

and they gave us some. So they are my friends. But yeah, their one is good. They make a nice sun cream, actually, as well. So you can double dip there. I'm sure it's not up to the standards of your imported sun creams. Just FYI, that means sunscreen. It's a British translation.

Yeah, if you can't make the logical leap from sun cream to sunscreen uh yeah that is that is what i'm talking about in the british defense though it is definitely a cream and not a screen so yeah that's on us yeah another uh incidence of british excellence oh my god our cast over yeah to be fair one of the few what do we got we got that we have the baking show and uh that's about it. Yeah. Can't think of much else. So there are also like natural ones, you know, like citronella is the one that people like. But I have just found that those don't work very well. I feel like it's a hit or miss. Yeah. I was going to say, I feel like it's like kind of for fun. Yeah. Like you'll feel great that you've done something. I think they just work by being

strong smells that kind of mask your other smells and you can get synthetic and natural plant oils and there are people who will sell you bracelets with like a little thing that's supposed to secrete the sutronella oh i i use i've used those the ones i have used look like like phone cords that are all spiraling yeah but they're little bracelets and i have, I put them on my ankles, put them on my wrists. Sometimes they work and sometimes I look like a dummy, but, uh, I don't know. So it was worth,

I've tried everything. Yeah. Sometimes I just burn incense and that kind of works again. I think it's kind of, it's a strong smell and the mosquitoes don't like it. Okay. That makes sense. Having incense in a box fan is not a bad solution.

Like I've done that in places where, uh, you know, nothing else was available. And that's pretty good. But yeah, if you're in a place where this is a problem, and it's becoming a bigger problem, right? The world is getting hotter. The climate is changing.

These swampy, marshy areas are drying up. So we're getting more stagnant water and less through flow. This is becoming a bigger problem. And our healthcare system is continuing to be fucked and getting worse, certainly the united states but so united kingdom and other places so yeah be careful of the mosquitoes remember to do your sun cream before your before your mosquito cream or lotion or whatever you're using screen your mosquito screen that's all about i got on mosquitoes shereen you got anything to add no i think that's a good a little summary about what to do for mosquitoes i hate mosquitoes so much and i'm

one of those people that don't think they should be around but since they are i guess we gotta deal with them so yeah it's nice to know that i use like a good thing like i think if i use something that you use i'm like wow i did something right by myself that's a list solely to get way ahead of me on the uh on this on the sun cream but no i i think it's uh it's helpful to know i'm sure many people out there are sensitive to mosquito bites and anything will help if they i don't know yeah it sucks it is getting so hot and they're everywhere and now the what's really bothering me is that they're getting smaller and harder to see but they're just as annoying yeah the bite still hurts even if they're smaller yeah yeah you got to get a really fine mesh for

your mosquito nets for that you can't be using other products yeah i don't have a mosquito net i should get one yeah get a mosquito net i love a head mosquito net. It's great. It serves you some... It stops the mosquitoes biting you. It stops other people talking to you. Wow. It's a great thing to have. Yeah. I have seen these videos of, like,

someone having a mosquito net on them and then, like, the mosquitoes... You can see it poking and not being able to reach. It's kind of funny. Like, mosquito armor. It's very funny. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, cool. Yeah. Thanks, James. Yeah, that's's fine it's a podcast brought to you by me hyper focusing on things which is what i do this is the way i deal with my anxiety about going to places which aren't necessarily uh places people go for fun word all right bye see ya it could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone See ya. Thanks for listening. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the i-positive and deeply entertaining podcast,

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