Fleas and why you should flee from them

Fleas - one of the Rothschild ladies devoted her life to becoming an expert on fleas. People used to have flea circuses and stage acts. Who cares about fleas? Why should we care? That's what I used to think. Being a traveller, I had no animals and no experience of fleas. Until I got to Singapore and saw teeny jumping flies in the shower room. What were they? Fleas! So what do you do with these irritating things? Swat them? Spray them? Ignore them? Are they a harmless annoyance or a serious danger?

Fleas and Disease
Let's start with worst case scenario. Can fleas do more than annoy? A well-read, scientific friend of mine who has studied medicine and botany told me: Fleas transmit disease. They caused bubonic plague.

Is this true - or just the current theory? My experiences of the cause of anything are that every century, sometimes every decade, the theories change. The real cause was not what you thought previously, or not only what you thought previously. However, I'm prepared to run with this idea.

Cause and Prevention of Epidemics
What causes epidemics? Why do epidemics die out? Is it because of preventive measure, because people move away, or grow immune, or all of the above?

Crowding in living spaces, dogs in the house, dogs with fleas, fleas going from infected people to the non-infected people, you may need two or more factors, you might find eliminating one solves the problem, you might find that one causes the problems, or that all cause the problems, but anything you do to eliminate one factor is likely to help.

Please suck blood from dead bodies. Dead bodies often ooze blood. Not just bodies of people who have been knifed or injured in road accidents or building site accidents or falls. People who die often ooze blood.

After my mother had a stroke and was taken to hospital, I returned to her home and was horrified to find the bed had an imprint of her body in blood. The smell hit you as you opened the bedroom door. If a human being can smell blood, from a body or a place where a person fell ill, then so can an insect. A polar bear can smell a source of food from ten miles away.

My Friend's Theory
My friend says:
"When I go away on holiday and come back the fleas in the house bite me because they have been without food for days because they could not bite me and I cleared out rubbish and wiped work surfaces before I left so the (surviving) fleas are hungry.

"Fleas want to such blood from rats and dogs, then humans. They therefore transmit ideas from rats and dogs to humans.

"When the flea is sick it cannot swallow the blood, so it keeps going from source to source because it is hungry, biting more and more and spreading more and more disease."

Yuk. My friend may be right or wrong. But now that I have an interest in this subject I shall investigate further. You may wish to do the same.

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Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.