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| Flea |
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| Tick |
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| Louse |
I am all for appropriate decoration on the facades of our great institutions, such as the figure of Justice on the Old Bailey or the statue of Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament. But the
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine might have crossed a line with the gilded bronze sculptures on its balconies.
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| Fruit fl |
Sensitive people might get the heebijeebies.
Most of the creepy-crawlies are unpleasant but not generally lethal, like the flea or the bedbug.
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| Bedbug |
Fruit flies are almost completely harmless and are even contributing mightily to medical knowledge because of their position as study species of choice for scientists.
Even the cobra does not kill many because it is too large to survive in competition with housing estates and roads.
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| Rat |
The rat is more of a hygiene problem than a mass-murderer. Bubonic plague, spread by a parasite on the brown rat, has not been significant for years.
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| Cobra |
There are two real killers here, however.
The Anopheles mosquito spreads malaria and the Culex mosquito distributes Nile fever and a number of other nasty diseases round the tropics.
Biodiversity notwithstanding, I for one wouldn't weep if they went extinct tomorrow.
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| Culex mosquito |
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| Anopheles mosquito |
I am indebted to Emma Golding, assistant archivist at the LSHTM, for identifying the creatures.
