There’s no denying that part of Shark Week’s appeal involves the deadliness of giant fish like the Great White. But it’s believed that sharks only kill about a dozen people each year. Meanwhile, mosquitoes — which can carry deadly illnesses like dengue fever, yellow fever, encephalitis, and malaria — kill more than half a million people every twelve months.
Overall, there are about 200 million malaria cases reported each year and each case can involve a long illness incapacitating sufferers for days at a time. Gates says this represents billions of dollars in lost human productivity — it’s something you can’t connect to even the deadliest sharks.
An so, in an effort to draw attention to the deadly mosquito, Gates is hosting a Mosquito Week on his website, The Gates Notes. In recent days Gates has posted a number of blog articles on the subject, from “What it Feels Like to Have Malaria,” to “Why I Gave My Blood to Defeat Dengue.”
“Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do,” Gates noted on his website. “Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.”
For the record, there are more than 2,500 different species of mosquito and not a single region in the world — with the exception of Antarctica — is spared this deadly little beast. Even scarier, during peak breeding seasons there are often more mosquitoes on the planet than virtually any other animal.
