A Big Scientific Test Of Mosquito Repellents
All makers of mosquito repellents will say that it’s their repellent that is the best. But what actually works?
An Anopheles stephensi mosquito is obtaining a blood meal from a human host through its pointed proboscis.
By Jim Gathany [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Scientists who were wondering the same thing recently decided to make a test of a few different repellents. And to be honest, their findings aren’t really great – none of the eleven tested repellents provided 100 % protection and some didn’t work at all.
The tests were fairly simple. The bait (a human) was put into an aerodynamic tunnel and was given the repellent. In the tunnel, a cage with mosquitoes was also located and the scientists observed how much are the mosquitoes attracted to the bait. For control experiments, they first just watched the movement of the mosquitoes without any bait and secondly with bait without any repellents.
So how exactly did it go? During the control experiments, 17.43 % were attracted when no bait was present and 88.82 % were attracted when bait was present at a distance from the cage of 1 meter. Five out of the eleven tested products provided no protection. These often used either oil of citronella or geraniol oil so if your anti-mosquito product uses only this it’s probably not going to work. On the other hand, three products provided significant protection as the rate of attraction went down significantly – 27.14 % to 33.7 % compared to the 88.82 % attraction rate without a repellent. The active solution in these was metofluthrin, oil of lemon eucalyptus (PMD) and a large concentration of diethyltoluamide (DEET).
So if you hate mosquitoes and their bites or you are going to travel to a country where mosquitoes can give you any of the very dangerous illnesses like Zika, Chikungunya, Yellow Fever or the Dengue Fever you should take a careful look at the ingredients the repellent uses.
Sources:
- If you like the content I’m producing about science maybe you will like the content I produce about gaming as well! Be sure to check out my other blogs!
- @gaming-trail Where we are your everyday source of gaming-news!
- @kralizec Where I review video games and make commentaries about video games