Question: What weighs in at one-six-hundred-thousandths the size of a King Cobra and is 10 times more dangerous?
Answer: Mosquitos
OK – lets start with the maths…
A mosquito weighs in at 10 milligrams. Therefore, you need 100 of them for a gram, right? If you put one hundred thousand of them in a paper bag they would weigh a kilogram. Compare that with a king cobra weighing 6 kilograms
All the venomous snakes in the world kill about 100,000 people each year whilst malaria spread by mosquitoes kills ten times that number.
What makes the statistic even more surprising is that the actual cause of malaria is a parasite in the saliva of mosquitos and the parasite is miniscule in comparison to the mosquito itself.
Children are often fascinated by facts and figures about dangerous animals so here is a list of a few more animals to feed their enthusiasm for the gruesome subject:
Deaths Caused by animals each year:
- Scorpions: 5,000
- Crocodiles: 2,000
- Elephants: 500
- Cape Buffalo: 300
- Lions: 200
- Jellyfish: 100
- Tigers: Less than 15
All of which goes to show how misleading statistics can be and children need to be taught the danger of this. They shouldn’t think that because mosquitos kill enormous numbers of people and tigers kill very few then it must be fairly harmless to go and cuddle a wild tiger on the family holiday to India.
Neither should they think that because they have been bitten by a mosquito in the UK that their days are numbered. In fact, nobody ever catches malaria from mosquitos in the UK but in an average year 6 people in the UK die from malaria caught abroad. Even in countries where mosquitoes carry the deadly parasite there are great strides being made to limit the number of malaria infections.
Image source - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mosquito_2007-2.jpg#/media/File:Mosquito_2007-2.jpg
Original Article - http://www.educationquizzes.com/blog-for-parents/2015/11/the-tiny-creature-that-kills-by-the-million/
