An unofficial companion to Maya Rosen’s essay “Mosquitoes are a choice” in Works in Progress, Issue 26. Made with Claude.
What’s drawn
The red dots. Which countries had Aedes aegypti each year is from the records. How many there were and exactly where is a simple model: about two per person in towns, a few in the countryside, fewer in the Amazon forest, none in the high Andes or the cold far north and south. Up close they’re drawn far larger than life.
Where each mark sits: the crosses, rings, boats, barrels, pools, taps and release points. The counts beside them are real. The dengue crosses on the whole continent only show where dengue was.
The order things happen inside a place: Panama’s smoke sweeps, the rounds in north-east Brazil, how the mosquito spread back inside each country (in 1997 the far west of Brazil’s Amazon was still free: it reached Rio Branco in 1995, Manaus in 1996 and Cruzeiro do Sul only in 2008, but how far it had got by then is drawn), Juazeiro’s month-by-month path to its result, and Yogyakarta’s squares: their layout, and the one shown close up with its dozen females and their generations. The trial had 24 squares, 12 of them released.
Sources
Havana and Panama: Gorgas, Sanitation in Panama (1915), and the Isthmian Canal Commission (1905).
The Vale do Canaã: Soper and others, “Yellow fever without Aedes aegypti” (1933).
North-east Brazil: Soper and Wilson, Anopheles gambiae in Brazil, 1930 to 1940 (1943).
The campaign and the return: PAHO’s resolutions and its 1997 report, Fraiha (1968), Löwy (2017) and, for Cuba, Kourí and others (1998).
Delhi: Wilbanks (2021).
Juazeiro: Carvalho and others (2015). Buildings from Overture Maps, streets and river from OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
The screwworm, Oxitec, the Keys and Singapore: the essay, and the Congressional Research Service (R49124, 2026).
Florida’s dengue: the CDC (2010), Graham and others (2011) and the Florida Department of Health.
Yogyakarta: Utarini and others (2021). The 87% is from a 2024 preprint.
Brazil’s dengue in 2024: its Ministry of Health. The map: Natural Earth.