[Book Review] Bitten: True Stories of Medical Bites and Stings

If you ever need more motivation to feel good about being a pest control operator, look no further than Pamela Nagami’s “Bitten: True Medical Stories of Bites and Stings.” The book details the effects of various insects, rodents and other unique pest pressures — cone snails, for example, have some of the most virulent poison on the planet, and a navy of jellyfish could waylay even the most intrepid of swimmers with their toxic tentacles.

Nagami, a medical doctor, infectious disease specialist and a professor at UCLA’s medical school, explains with a clinical specificity the enormous consequences and pitfalls of encounters with the tiniest of insects and microorganisms.

Sleeping sickness, spread by the bites of tsetse flies in Africa, is caused by a protozoan called trypanosome and can cause its victims to develop chills and such an affinity for meat that they start to eat dead bodies.

The sandfly spreads a disease called leishmaniasis, which causes a victim’s lymph glands to swell and eats away at his face until his nose falls off.
Many species of ticks have no eyes whatsoever, and find their way around — and their next blood meal — by virtue of a specialized organ that allows them to sense heat and carbon dioxide emissions of potential prey. Oh, and their bites can paralyze you.

And the treatments for the diseases often are just as scary as the diseases themselves. For example, melarsoprol, which is used to treat a strain of sleeping sickness “is a terrifying drug to administer,” Nagami writes, “because it is only slightly less toxic to people than it is to trypanosome.”

Nagami also takes up the more typical vectors a pest management professional is apt to encounter: the danger of rabies in bats and raccoons, or the apocalyptic effects red fire ants can have on a local ecosystem. But she also uncovers some very interesting information on organisms (which, oddly, seem to all thrive in Australia) a PCO will hopefully never tangle with.

Cone snails — tiny slugs that live inside brightly colored shells — for example, stun and kill their prey with a toxin a thousand times stronger than morphine. The venom, comprising thousands of unique proteins, is constantly changing, so the poor fishes can never develop a resistance to it.

But the best part of the book is Nagami’s asides, written in a voice that sounds like she’s annotating a medical report in her study. In a chapter dealing with monkeys, she describes several cases where patients reported having feces and urine sprayed into their mouths and eyes, and subsequently developed infections.

“Apparently,” she writes, “such exposures are commonplace in the monkey house.”

The author is assistant editor of PCT magazine.

Bitten: True Stories of Medical Bites and Stings
By Pamela Nagami, M.D.
352 pages. St. Martin’s Griffin
To order, visit www.pctonline.com/store or call 800/456-0707.