Professor Andrew Spielman has dedicated his life to understanding this insect. Here, he tells the story of man's struggle to live with the mosquito, from the defeat of Sir Francis Drake's fleet, to the death of thousands of Frenchmen working on the Panama Canal, to the panic over the West Nile Virus in New York. He shows how we have accelerated the spread of disease, describing the catastrophic failures of mosquito controls which have ensured that - even now - one person dies of malaria every 12 seconds.