Mosquito fighting newspaper in our future?

My typical week during the summer as editor of the PCN breaks down like this: 60 hours working, 49 hours sleeping, three hours trying to get my car to start and the last 56 hours slapping mosquitoes off my skin.

I had heard all the stories about the little flying cannibals that Phillips County Folk spend all summer swatting and I was 100-percent sure that they were overblown. Well, I can bumpily tell you that I am now officially a member of Phillips County as I have been attacked by these skeeters so much that last night I played pink-welt connect the dots with a red Magic Marker on my bug bites and when I was done the riddle read “resistance is futile!”

Now I have dealt with mosquitoes before, but nothing like this. In Mineral County, where I moved here from, the little buggers come out about this time of year and are gone a few weeks later. These mosquitoes are big and lumbering, easy to see and even easier to kill. The Phillips County skeeter, however, are like little flying ninjas. You don’t see them coming at you until it is way too late and they have attacked you with pinpoint precision.

In preparation for this column, I did some research and came across a story about Dengue Fever, also known as backbone fever, a disease transmitted be several species of mosquitoes. There are five different types of infections associated with Dengue Fever and the symptoms range from a mild fever all the way up to bleeding gums and vomiting …sounds sort of like a trip to Taco Bell, eh? Dengue emerged as a worldwide problem in the 1950’s and rarely occurs in the continental United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So for now I think we are in the clear (though the Asian tiger mosquito, common in the Eastern and Central states, is a documented carrier of dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya a, dog heartworm and West Nile…I’m getting itchier with each letter I type.)

My research eventually landed me on a recent story out of Sri Lanka where a newspaper promotion went above and beyond in trying to keep its readership mosquito-bite free. The Mawbina, a nationwide newspaper, initiated a campaign in which all of the type on the pages was printed with an ink that was combined with citronella essence and once a reader was done with the paper they could wipe their bodies with the pages to repel mosquitoes. Now I have heard all the jokes about where one might potentially use the pages of this newspaper to wipe, but as mosquito repellent? That was new to me. The paper increased their run at the press for the week and saw sales increase by 30-percent and saw the overall readership rise by 300,000.

Now I can only imagine how expensive it would be to use ink infused with citronella on these pages knowing how much it costs to simply make a few pages of the PCN print in color. That said, it would be awesome to drive down the street and see people using these pages as typo-filled insect wipes.

If I can get the boss’s approval on spending the money on citronella ink in the summer, maybe I can also convince them to use turkey gravy ink in the fall, peppermint ink in the winter and grass-cutting ink in the spring.

The possibilities are endless but thankfully, for you, this column is not.

Thanks for reading, itch a welt for me and Aloha.