Experts: Flick that mosquito

A medical journal documents a Pennsylvania case.
TOLEDO (AP) -- The knee-jerk response to a bloodsucking mosquito is to squash it. But some medical experts say that approach can smash infections from the bug into your skin.
An article this month in the New England Journal of Medicine tells the story of a 57-year-old Pennsylvania woman who died in 2002 of a fungal infection in her muscles called Brachiola algerae.
Doctors were puzzled -- the fungus that killed her was thought to be found only in mosquitoes and other insects. But it's not found in mosquito saliva like West Nile and malaria are. So a simple mosquito bite couldn't have caused the infection.
The article's authors concluded that the woman must have smashed a mosquito on her skin, smearing its body parts into the bite.
"I think if a mosquito was in midbite, it would be wiser to flick the mosquito off rather than squashing it," said one of the authors, Christina Coyle of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Ticks
People already take similar advice when removing ticks from skin. Doctors have long cautioned that squashing a tick on skin could put a person at greater risk of Lyme disease, said Dawn Wesson, a tropical medicine specialist at Tulane University.
Despite the Pennsylvania woman's case, Roger Nasci, a mosquito expert at a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention facility in Fort Collins, Colo., said there's no scientific basis for switching to flicking.
"There are no published data I'm aware of that document the risk of infections by fungus microbes associated with squashing vs. flicking blood-feeding mosquitoes," he said.
Wesson also pointed out that flicking the bugs off isn't the most permanent solution.
"Unfortunately, then the mosquito often goes on to bite another person, or bites you again."