I have a mosquito story, which I shared with my friend Nicole, who I call "Mango", a few years ago when we were in Thailand. BTW, That's Mango in front, then me, then Ananya, who's name means "sun god", I think. Although once a girl at school thought his name was pronounced, "An Onion", a story Ananya likes to tell. Here, we're on a boat between Thailand, Burma and Laos, which Mango & Ananya said was "fake Laos" because we didn't go far enough into the village to need our passports. I insisted they were both insane.

So here's my mosquito story. I was in 3rd grade at Incarnation, a small Catholic school in Alsip, IL. We were in Reading class. My friend Michelle was reading quickly, to get through her section when she came across the word "mosquito". She pronounced it, "mos-qweet-o", obviously by mistake and she was very embarrassed, because she turned red when the teacher corrected her. I found it very amusing, and kept saying it over and over, louder and louder, "Mos-QWEE-tow". Something went wrong with my brain. I couldn't stop. I finally got sent into the hall.

In the hall, I saw Sister Marcele coming. She was big and scary. So I stood on my chair and pretended to fix the artwork we had taped on the window, as if this was my assignment. She gave me the evil eye, but I just smiled and continued straightening the art. She never asked. I felt smart for faking her out.

Since the day I shared this story with Mango, she has taken to calling me "Sqweet".

That's my whole story. But, what I didn't realize back then was that MosQWEETos are very very dangerous.

In "The End of Poverty", Jeffrey Sachs explains that malaria is transmitted when a female anopheles mosquito takes a blood meal from somebody already infected with malaria. After being ingested by the mosquito, the parasite finds its way to the mosquito's gut. There it undergoes a life-cycle transformation, after which the parasite migrates back to the mosquito's salvary glands, where it can be injected into another victim.

The life-cycle change, called sporogony, takes about two weeks, roughly the life span of the mosquito itself. If the mosquito dies before sporogony is completed, the mosquito never becomes infective.

Transmitting malaria requires two consecutive human bites: the first for the mosquito to ingest the parasite, the second for the mosquito to infect another person.

No children need to die, and none will if they have access to all of the modern tools of disease prevention and treatment. (He's talking about common household insecticides and mosquito nets!!) Yet malaria sets the perfect trap: it impoverishes a country, making it too expensive to prevent and treat the disease. Thus malaria continues and poverty deepens in a truly vicious cycle.