On my recent reporting trip to Brazil, I went on a hike and got bitten 40 times by an unknown insect.
The welts were larger than mosquito bites and were completely painless until they began itching relentlessly a day later. Worse than the physical irritation, though, was the fact that, as a health writer, I know about all the different diseases South American bugs can carry.
At the time, Zika was just starting emerge, but I was most worried about a different threat: Leishmaniasis. There are several strains of this parasitic infection, but the one in Brazil can damage the mucous membranes in the face, eventually causing the nose and mouth to partly disintegrate.
I know this because I sat in a Starbucks for hours on my last day in Rio, googling every study on leishmaniasis and saving it to Evernote, so that the team of international health experts who would eventually convene in a top-secret clean room and race to find the antidote could use them for reference.
[For more of this story, written by Olga Khazan, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...y-singing-it/477960/]
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