Gin and Tonic?

Oh.. I love trivia. So I found myself picking up tonic water and limes at the grocery store this week. Melissa(my downstairs neighbor) and I have decided to go on a diet, so we figured we would substitute red wine/beer with gin and diet tonic with lots of lime, cuz its cold season and you have to get your vitamin C somewhere. That’s about the extent of our diet, I added doing sit ups during commercials but Melissa has TIVO so she will be exercising her index finger.

The label on the bottle caught my attention, Contains QUININE. I’m not a doctor, though I wouldn’t mind marrying one. Anyway quinine is used to treat malaria, I know this because it’s also a blood thinner and if I were ever to get malaria I’d die, either from the quinine use to relieve its symptoms or the parasites in my body. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes, but only female mosquitoes bite. What I can’t figure out, is how do male mosquitoes survive if they can’t suck some refreshing blood?

Quinine comes from the bark of some tree that grows in the Andes, it also gives tonic its bitter. Tonic as we know it was invented by the British when they decided to colonize India and Africa, gin and tonic was used as a prophylactic against malaria. Those British are clever.