Why you're always the one to get bitten by mozzies
Are you always the one to wake up on holiday covered in mosquito bites while your friends and family get away scot-free?
Thankfully, an in-depth examination into why mosquitos are attracted to certain people is finally underway, and the researches are using socks to find out.
British researchers plan on collecting the smelly socks from 200 sets of identical and nonidentical twins in a bid to find what role human genetics has in the process of mosquito prey selection.
The scientists will place the socks inside a wind tunnel with the mozzies and observe their reactions, hoping that they will find both naturally repellent and naturally attractive odors that they can then study further.
Lead researcher James Logan, a medical entomologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told Scientific American: “We know very little about the genetics of what makes us attractive to mosquitoes.
"We hope this study will give us more insights into the mechanisms that help change our body odours to make us more or less attractive to mosquitos. If we can identify important genes, perhaps we could develop a pill or medication that would allow the body to produce natural repellents to keep mosquitoes away.”
Now doesn't that sound dreamy?
While we wait for the study to give us the answer, there are some factors that we already know could be making us more or less attractive to these bugs.
For instance, researchers have found that people who exhale more carbon dioxide are mosquito magnets, while there is evidence to suggest that taller people, as well as pregnant women or those in a particular phase of the menstrual cycle will also be more attractive to mozzies.
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