Our fear of leeches all in the mind

TREKKING in the jungles of Borneo has its privations.

It’s hot and humid, rain buckets down in sudden storms and there are mosquitoes, some of which carry malaria. Snakes are hard to spot. They can be coiled in branches just above your head and it’s no use talking loudly to warn them off; serpents are deaf. Ants, 3cm long, deliver a sting the pain of which is said to last 24 hours.

On a recent trip, however, I was surprised to find that most people’s jungle nightmares involved none of these bogeymen. The demon of the rainforest, the creature which really spooks visitors from the West, is a relative of the humble earthworm, the leech. Having no limbs of their own, leeches resort to hitch-hiking to get around. They hang on to things using a sucker on the head and another at the tip of the tail. Brown leeches, one of two types found in Borneo, live in muddy puddles. When a person approaches, the brown leech grabs onto a boot and climbs aboard.