Here at Uproxx we love animals. If we had our own mixtape, “The Circle of Life” would definitely be somewhere on the B side. But as much as we love animals, even the ones who can be dicks sometimes, we have spent our lives hating mosquitoes because they are dicks all the time.
Reasons Why Mosquitoes Are Dicks
1. They make a super annoying buzzing noise. Virtually every second of their lives.
2. They drink blood like vampires, but have none of the brooding, dangerous, orientation-scrambling sexuality of vampires.
3. They have ability to fly which is jealousy-inducing.
4. Oodles and oodles of murder.
And just how many murders are in an “oodle,” you may ask? How about 725,000. That’s how many people die every year from malaria and other infectious diseases contracted from mosquitoes. Humans are responsible for 475,000 deaths a year. Sharks only kill 10. Selfie accidents kill even more. Arnold Schwarzenegger “only” killed 81 people in Commando. That means mosquitoes kill 894,962 percent more people every year than prime Schwarzenegger during a pun-filled murder rampage.
But after millions of years of causing itchy bumps and slaughtering humanity, it appears that mosquitoes might finally be responsible for something that isn’t completely terrible. Because Danish scientists may have discovered a potential cure for cancer that can be derived from the deadly malaria parasite that mosquitoes carry. Like so many scientific breakthroughs — penicillin, Viagra, flubber — the researchers made this discovery by accident. As reported by The Independent:
Danish researchers were hunting for a way of protecting pregnant women from malaria, which can cause huge problems because it attacks the placenta. But they found at the same time that armed malaria proteins can attack cancer, too–an approach which could be a step towards curing the disease.
Scientists have combined the bit of protein that the malaria vaccine uses to bury into cells and combined it with a toxin–that can they bury into cancer cells and release the toxin, killing them off.
Scientists hope that they can begin human trials of the process in the next four years. But so far, the findings have been very promising:
In the tests on mice, the animals were implanted with three different types of human cancers. It reduced non-Hodgkins’s lymphoma tumours to about a quarter of their size, got rid of protstate [sic] cancer entirely in two of sic mice and kept alive five out of six mice that had metastatic bone cancer compared to a control group all of which died.
Though a cure for cancer is still many years away, this discovery will hopefully speed up that process. And even if this malaria cure can put even a small dent in the world’s eight million annual cancer deaths, mosquitoes will be able to repay their debt to humanity in no time.
So the next time you see a mosquito, take a moment to thank them for their contributions to medical research and the hope they are giving to the millions who are suffering from cancer. And after that moment is over, immediately smash that mosquito with a rolled up newspaper.
Because mosquitoes are still dicks.
