What are the awful choices that victims of mosquitoes have to face? Be tortured by mosquito bite; or never venture out in the evenings; cover oneself from head to toe and still get bitten right through a t-shirt or socks and worse of all, contract malaria or dengue. Two children a day die in India from mosquito bite. And as global warming increases, mosquitoes will increase their spread and ferocity.

The other choice is to use chemical repellents in the market—all of which contain poison clearly. The repellent sprays mostly use diethyl-meta-toluamide (DEET), a chemical that can cause rashes, swelling, eye irritation, brain swelling in children, anaphylactic shock, low blood pressure and even death. You can rub that dreadful chemical cream all over you and stink. Then you can use insecticide incense coils and keep the mosquitoes away. The point is that they stink just as much and are also poisonous.

So what can else be done?

Lemon grass cure

Why not grow and make your own repellent. Plant a few stalks of lemon grass anywhere in your garden or in flower pots in your verandah. Within a few months, they will become clumps.You can use the stalks as herbs in your salad. It grows quickly. It keeps the mosquitoes away.It contains something similar to citronella oil but is far more effective.

You can rub the long, grassy leaves on the skin, its stalk works even better.

Here is how one user describes it, “Take one stalk of fresh lemon grass. Grip it near the ground and give it a sharp sideways tug to break it off from the clump. Peel off the outer leaves, snap off the grass blades behind the swollen stem at the base. Bend the stem between your fingers, loosening it, rub it vigorously between your palms so that it fractures into a kind of fibrous juicy mass, and rub this mass over all exposed skin, covering thoroughly.”

It has a pleasant smell and the protection lasts a minimum of four to five hours.

You can make a tincture of lemon grass that can be sprayed. Some people use a base of gin or vodka. Chop up the cores of five or six stalks of lemon grass, put them in a blender with a tumblerful of spirits, blend thoroughly, strain, and put it in a sprayer.

Actually, you don’t need alcohol to dissolve the lemon grass essential oil. It works just as well if you blend it with water and shake the sprayer before using it. If you can’t grow lemon grass just buy some lemon grass essential oil. Add a couple of other essential oils for extra effectiveness: a combination of lemon grass oil, citronella oil and eucalyptus oil gives good protection all day. Mix about one ml each of lemon grass oil, citronella oil and eucalyptus oil with 100-150 ml of water.

Other plant oils mosquitoes don’t like are citronella, jojoba, neem, witch hazel, tea tree oil, peppermint, lemon basil, lemon oregano, lemon geranium, catnip, eucalyptus and pennyroyal.

Rise of the mosquitoes

Deforestation and unchecked growth of cities without planned sewage are reasons behind an alarming increase in mosquitoes. The World Health Organisation says “global warming is also expanding the range of mosquitoes that carry malaria, putting millions more humans at risk. Malaria mosquitoes (Anopheles sp.) are appearing in areas where they’ve never been seen before. In the history of the world, more people have died from diseases transmitted by mosquitoes than from all the fighting in all the wars.” Malaria infects approximately 110 million people a year, and with increasing drug resistance, the problem is worsening as attempts to control the mosquitoes with pesticides have proved ineffective.

In fact, even in countries like India that have not banned dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT), malaria and other mosquito-related diseases kill a  number of people.

Bed nets were proposed as the answer and thousands of chemically treated mosquito nets were given away free in Africa. But, according to a study from Senegal published in The Lancet, mosquitoes quickly develop resistance to bed nets treated with insecticide.  

So, the search needs to intensify for safe, cheap, effective, locally available alternatives to insecticides and malaria drug treatments that no longer work. In other words, plants.

Plants and dung

Chinese scientists have extracted an anti-malarial drug from the Artemisia annua fern, traditionally used against malaria for hundreds of years. It is now used in many countries and is proving effective. In India, a homemade mosquito repellent against the Anopheles mosquito can be made from low-cost neem oil from the neem tree mixed with coconut oil in concentrations of 1-2. Neem is also proving effective against malaria itself, not just the mosquito that carries the parasite. One active component of the plant, gedunin, is said to be as effective as quinine on malaria-infected cell cultures.

Peppermint oil is also turning out to be a new, cheap weapon in the fight against mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, filariasis, dengue fever and West Nile virus. The oil not only repels adult mosquitoes but also kills the larvae. It is particularly effective against the Anopheles culicifacies mosquito.

Another promising candidate is catnip. Researchers report that nepetalactone, the essential oil in catnip, is about ten times moreeffective at repelling mosquitoes than DEET.

The women of my parliamentary constituency Pilibhit have an answer that I have been using for years. It is a combination of large round cow dung tablets mixed with samagri. Light one up and take it around the house. The mosquitoes keep away and the air smells similar to time when there is a poojahavan in the house. It should be on sale in a few months as an entrepreneur is working with them. Prof. Anil Gupta of IIM Ahmedabad’s group designed the machine and I hope this solves the poverty problems of some women, the gobar problems of the gaushalas and the mosquito problems of India.

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