A biting issue
His hand burned as he held it up against his forehead. Sweat poured off of him onto his sheets. He was too tired to get out of bed to ask for help. The onset of shaking chills kept taking over his fever and he tried to keep warm, but the sheets were wet. At the age of 15, he didn’t want to think about it but knew he had become another victim of the epidemic that was spreading wildly throughout his village.
Rui-de Xue, a scientist at St. Augustine’s Anastasia Mosquito Control District who grew up in the countryside of China, survived his battle with malaria as a child, but one of his neighbors died from malaria when she was 9. His brush with the infectious disease transmitted by the bite of an infected female mosquito sparked his interest in battling the insects. Xue came to Florida—“the capital of mosquitoes”—and is working toward finding a cure.
His studies include mosquito feeding behavior, their biting cycles, what kind of animals they prefer to feed on, their response rate to different attractants and repellents and the process of egg laying. Now, he conducts public education classes concerning the importance of mosquito control, he says, which is the first step to swatting out mosquito-related diseases.