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It doesn't have to be a vampire but if it drinks your blood you are entitled to feel uneasy about it. Indeed, humans have evolved a capacity to fear biting insects of various kinds. The mass media are there to help cultivate your fear.
The humble mosquito is mostly ignored by those of us who encounter it each day. That is mainly because we do not live in malarial regions. Every once in a while, news organizations have fun with mosquitoes, however.
A few years back, we had the prospect of a bona fide mosquito-borne epidemic here in North America. Birds were coming down with West Nile virus in New England. Would people be next? Since then, mosquito stories have not risen above the level of a rabid squirrel.
Sensational journalism follows a very simple formula. Find something that people think is completely safe and convince them that it is potentially fatal. Tainted hamburger meat, or eggs with salmonella, is a perfect story guaranteed to create the maximum anxiety in the greatest number of people.
Generally speaking, the news makes more of a splash if the danger is caused by a hostile agent rather than sloppy practices at an egg farm. Over two decades ago, Tylenol was being deliberately poisoned in the New York area creating a huge story (and ultimately improving the safety of drug containers). Deliberate sending of anthrax through the mail was another very big story in its day.
The most sensational story of all is terrorism. Imagine that there are people living in caves in Afghanistan whom none of us has ever met. Yet, they spend their lives hatching plots to destroy us.
Even when Osama bin Laden became well-known enough to appear in Time magazine, most people, including the U.S. government, found it implausible that we would be attacked. The fact of the attack, and everything about its execution, including the use of suicide operatives, and the conversion of civilian aircraft into incendiary bombs to attack commercial skyscrapers contributed to its appeal as sensational journalism.
It is not hard to believe that boarding a flight is dangerous, whatever the statistics say. The concept of being at risk while working in one's office during the day is sheer sensationalism
Before 9/11, a lot of people had worried about such damp squibs as the Millennium bug that was supposed to fry computer networks around the world. Now the sensationalists are trying to get us all worked up about bed bugs.
I recently went on a trip that necessitated staying in a cheap motel and can attest to the Yuck factor of bedbugs. I didn't see any actual bedbugs, of course but did imagine them sneaking out of crevices in the middle of the night and promenading across the vast expanse of a king size mattress to feed on my fretfully sleeping body. I slept fine but woke to find a spot of blood on the sheet next to a small wound at my elbow.
This was most likely a scratch from a bramble sustained before leaving home. I would not have given it a second thought if I had not been hearing so much about our ancient nighttime parasite.
If you want to worry about something, it might as well be the bedbug. After all, our ancestors survived them for millennia. They evidently cause no serious diseases. As sensational material they have nothing on terrorists. We should count ourselves lucky to be worried about them. So sleep tight and let the bedbugs bite.
