Change of address in Bang Na, trading in this …
… and this …
… for this!
The back of the front of many lovely trees on the third floor, facing east, for the big sky up on the eighth floor, looking west into downtown Bangkok.
The move was precipitated by a couple of sudden unforeseen events, one being the sad and lonely death of a neighbour.
The other, bigger cause was this guy: Paederus.
It’s probably Paederus peregrinus, which is well known in Indonesia, but who knows? Paederus melampus rampages through India, and their cousins are found all over the world. For Thai purposes, it is duang nam man.
They’re all members of the rove beetle family Staphylinidae, order Coleoptae, 622 different species and counting. They’re not much bigger than a mosquito, but they neither bite nor sting.
Here’s what they do: They land on you and have a look around, and when you slap them dead, they gush out their very own chemical toxin, paederin. If you know you’ve just been slimed by this “venom of other arthropods” — as it was listed on my hospital bill — you can wash it off with soap and water.
If you don’t, wherever the chemical sits on your skin, and wherever you transfer it with your fingers, is going to grow whiplash welts within a few hours — linear dermatitis, also known as irritant contact dermatitis.
The skin around the eyes being routinely manhandled, the affliction came to be known as “Nairobi eye” in Africa and then elsewhere, but the blister-like lesions can be on any part of the body that’s exposed to the paederin. The photo here comes from the DocFiles blog. I had it much worse, but didn’t think to get a picture.
Intense pain and temporary blindness can result when the toxin gets in your eyes. If you’re unlucky, you might move on to hyperpigmentation, secondary infections, hair loss and really bad ulcers on the skin requiring hospitalisation.
Paederin, which is manufactured primarily by the female beetles (naturally!), is a vesicant, so I read, “that blocks mitosis at low levels, apparently by inhibiting protein and DNA synthesis without affecting RNA synthesis”.
For most people, a dose of antibiotics is all that’s needed, and the lesions dry out to become crusted and scaly over the course of a week.
That was what happened to me after a night at the computer by an open window, going to bed with nettle-like stinging around the eyes, awakening with grotesquely bloated eyelids and lesions on my nose, chin and one ear. If I’d swatted a bug that landed on me, I’d assumed it was a mosquito.
The first doctor I saw inexplicably diagnosed conjunctivitis and didn’t bother prescribing antibiotics. The second doctor I saw, two days later and a lot worse for wear, knew immediately what had happened.
Even the mighty US Army worries about these bugs. It issued a paper to the GIs in Iraq last November, warning them that paederus beetles love to swarm around light towers, to which they’re drawn from long distances.
Yes, they fly, even though you can’t see wings in the photo above or when they’re walking around. The wings are covered by the bug’s elytral, the lid over its first three abdominal segments. But they prefer to run, and they’re quite fast.
So what’s the point of sharing the planet with a skinny little pincer insect that lives among trees, eats garbage, flies in the window and, if you slap it, releases a poison that wrecks your skin?
1. They eat crop pests too, so farmers love them.
2. The very chemical that causes the skin to swell and peel makes it ideal for treating boils, nasal polypi and ringworm, which Chinese doctors were doing 1,400 years ago.
You have to share the planet.
3. They prodded me and my family to move, and look what we got out of the deal:
Peering into the downtown core
The Bitec complex on the far side of the Royal Dragon Restaurant
And the newest of the bridges across the Chao Phraya River.
