Transcript
If you're one of those people who get stung a lot by mosquitoes, there's actually a lot of scientific research for why that might be the case, and some of it is a little surprising. I've been doing a lot of research recently for an article that I'm writing on all of the science, but I'll give you guys a quick download. So the one thing that a lot of people talk about is blood type, blood type, blood type. And there are a handful of studies that show that if you have an old blood type, you're a little bit more likely to have mosquitoes go to you and maybe also sting you, although a bunch of the studies only looked at their landing habits as opposed to their land and bite habits. because surprise, surprise, people in trials don't like actually being bitten. Those are usually the older trials where they agreed to have it happens. These days, they use a cool setup where they have mosquitoes coming through and they get exposed to your odor, and then see whether or not they go down the channel and the pathway that leads to your odor versus some random control. But O does seem to attract them a bit more, followed by B, followed by A and A, B, which are pretty much the same. But in addition to that, there's also your microbiome on your skin, to different types of smells that you produce, and the mosquitoes are not attracted by sight, they're attracted by smell. So the bacterial composition, which can be pretty steady state, producing compounds like carboxylic acid, which have been shown to attract mosquitoes. So if you're a mosquito attractor, then it's probably going to be mosquito attractor for life as opposed to just temporary. That's being said, there are factors that are temporary that can increase your likelihood of getting bitten or attracting mosquitoes. One of them is pregnancy. Pregnant women seem to attract. them more than non-pregate women, but also from a dietary perspective, bananas and beer both seem to increase the amount that mosquito is going to be attracted to you a couple hours later. I know I hate on bananas a lot here for some random reason, but it just seems to be that nothing does cause problems. They're still delicious though, so eat a banana, have some mosquito repellent, and you should be good. I will be having a much more detailed video on all this coming out soon.
Additional notes
Raise your hand 👋 if you’re mire attractive… to mosquitos. Or tag that friend who is 😉 #science #edutok #mosquito #4thofjuly
References
- No references found in the spreadsheet caption or matched Notion source page.