Mosquito may not cock indinated
Hugh Sturrock/Alamy
Hedonists who drink beer do not wash, share a bed and avoid Sunnscreen can be more attractive to mosquitoes – at least, that’s what a study of festival guests found.
For their mosquito magnet trials, Sara Lynn visits the blank at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands and her colleagues 2023 Lowlands Festival, near Amster. They asked 465 Wait to fill in the questionnaire about their health, diet, hygiene, sunscreen app, any drug use, blood type and what they had slept alone the night before.
The team also created a provisional laboratory in shipping containers containing 1700 captivity with mosquito (Anopheles Stephensi), Which can transfer malaria.
Between 20 and 35 mosquitoes were put in by series of clear plastic containers with a perforated dividing line participants’ arms from the insects so they could try to land on the dreams but not actually bite them.
The researchers counted how many times the mosquito tried to land at the festival director in three minutes compared to a decy of cotton pads soaked in glucose.
“Mosquito showed a clear preference for the well -hydrated, on hops and grapes, that is,” according to the researchers. “The arm -landings were significantly higher in beer drinkers compared [with] Those who had obeyed the refill for at least 12 hours. “
The blank says she won’t let this expose her to beer. “I just wanted to wear long sleeves and insectrepele,” she says.
The researchers also found that “participants who successfully lured a fellow in their tent the previous night also turned out to be more enticing for mosquitoes”. Sunscreen appeared to reject the mosquito, possible by masking skin smell or acting as a rejection. The researchers found no evidence that different blood types attract or reject the pests.
“We found that mosquitoes are drawn to those who have sunscreen, drink beer and share their bed,” according to the team. “They simply have a taste for the hedonists among us.”
Festival goers put their arm through a partition where mosquito could try to land on theirs but actually not do
Lowlands Festival/National Wetenschapsagenda Holland
Cameron Webb at the University of Sydney says it is a fun study that he wished he had thought of, but it included onely a mosquito and the results would probably different.
The researchers also found that only four of the participants had zero attempts at landings on their arms. “The biggest take-out message for me is that the vast majority of participants, respectively to all the other factors, consider attractive mosquitoes looking for a blood meal,” says Webb. “The reality is that if we just reminded Beselves to go on mosquito repellers and spent less time thinking about why mosquitoes bite us, we would all probably receive fewer bites and lower our risk of mosquito-borne disease.
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