The bad buzz

She wears her toxic status as a red badge of contagion: The blood she's already drawn from someone else, which she mixes with a solvent to introduce in microscopic amounts to get your own blood flowing more freely.

She's an aedes aegyptii mosquito -- a daytime biter harder to manage than the garden-variety twilight-feeding culex our Mosquito Control District is so good at swatting. Aedes is also the one also responsible for yellow fever. But there's a vaccine for that, and none for dengue fever (nor is there any specific treatment). And recent tests here showed 99 positives for dengue among 240 people tested by the state and feds in Old Town. Eight were positive not just for antibodies, but for active or recent infection.

They aren't using words like "outbreak," considering we're a tourist town and nobody wants anybody scared off, but that's what it is. And this week's rains mean some nervous itches in a few weeks.

Of course, any time Robert feels peckish now, he starts wondering about dengue. I pooh-pooh that: It's much more likely to be H1N1.