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Title: Beer Drinkers Are Mosquito Magnets, According To a Festival Study

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/2...

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Some people are simply
mosquito magnets while others emerge relatively unscathed. But why is this
so? One explanation, according to scientists from the Netherlands, is beer.
To find out why the blood-sucking critters prefer some people over others, a
research team led by Felix Hol of Radboud University Nijmegen took thousands
of female Anopheles mosquitoes to Lowlands, an annual music festival held in
the Netherlands. Researchers set up a pop-up lab in connected shipping
containers in 2023, and around 500 volunteers took part. First, they filled
out a questionnaire about their hygiene, diet and behavior at the festival.
Then, to see how attractive they are to mosquitoes, they placed their arm
into a custom-designed cage filled with the pesky insects. The cage had tiny
holes so the mosquitoes could smell the person's arm but couldn't bite them.
A video camera recorded how many insects landed on a volunteer's arm compared
to a sugar feeder on the other side of the cage. By comparing the video
footage and questionnaire answers, researchers saw some clear results emerge.
Participants who drank beer were 1.35 times more attractive to mosquitoes
than those who didn't. The tiny vampires were also more likely to target
people who had slept with someone the previous night. The study also revealed
that recent showering and sunscreen make people less attractive to the
buzzing menace. "We found that mosquitoes are drawn to those who avoid
sunscreen, drink beer, and share their bed," the researchers wrote in a paper
uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server. "They simply have a taste for the
hedonists among us."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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