Medicine: Of Men & Mosquitoes

St. Petersburg, Fla., was an embattled city last week. At night, trucks drove through the palm-lined streets and the stands of scrub pine and palmetto, spewing a chemical fog onto house-and treetops, all the way to the mangrove swamps lining Florida's Gulf coast. Local citizens were fighting, if not on the beaches, at least in the streets and their own backyards, cleaning out every container in which mosquitoes could find enough water to breed. Bird lovers got a stern official warning: stop feeding the birds or putting out water for them.

The alarm was...

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