2023-05-23 10:02:33
A better understanding of the ingredients in care products that repel insects, such as mosquitoes, could lead to more effective mosquito repellents.
The liquid soap you use in the shower can react with your natural scent and make you more attractive to mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes use different methods to find a target for their next meal of (human) blood, such as detecting body heat, odor and the CO2 exhaled by the victim.
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To check whether body washa kind of shower gel, has an effect, selected molecular geneticist Clement Vinauger of Virginia Tech University and his colleagues variants of the marks Dial, Dove, Native in Simple Truth.
Natural fragrance
First, they placed two strips of nylon on one of the forearms of four volunteers and wrapped that area in foil to trap the participants’ natural scent. Next, the researchers washed part of the other forearm with about 1 gram of one of the body wash brands for 10 seconds, then rinsed with water for 10 seconds. Then, in the same way, they applied two strips of nylon and foil to forearms to trap the scent of the body wash. The researchers repeated this for the three other brands.
One hour after the samples (the strips) were taken, they took two strips—one from each of the areas exposed to the body wash and one from the areas not exposed to the body wash—for chemical analysis.
Increase in attractiveness
The researchers placed the other strips in cages with 16 to 25 female yellow fever mosquitoes (Temples of the Egyptians). The Simple Truth body wash was found to increase the attractiveness of all participants, as measured by the number of times the mosquitoes landed on the body wash-treated strips, compared to their strips without body wash. Dove had a similar effect, but the increase in attractiveness was only very clear in three of the four participants.
Dial’s body wash also made participants more attractive to mosquitoes, but to a lesser extent than Simple Truth’s or Dove’s. The mosquitoes avoided the Native body wash strips, and showed a particularly strong distaste for one participant’s strip. This suggests that the scents of the body wash and the participants’ individual scents combined to create an odor that was detectable by the mosquitoes. The researchers published the research iScience.
“Our research emphasizes the importance of the interaction between the specific substances in soap and each person’s body odor in determining whether someone becomes more or less attractive to mosquitoes after applying soap to their skin,” says Vinauger.
Mosquito repellents
The researchers plan to repeat their study with a larger group of participants and more types of body wash. They want to investigate how long the potential mosquito-attracting or mosquito-repellent effects last after it has been washed off the skin.
“The discovery that personal care products can cause mosquitoes to be attracted or repelled by the user opens the door for developing easy-to-use mosquito repellents,” says molecular biologist Walter Leal from the University of California at Davis.
“The chemicals in such products may not directly affect mosquito behavior, but they may disrupt the specific ratio of human emissions that attract mosquitoes,” he says. “However it works, reducing human-mosquito interactions reduces transmission of mosquito-borne diseases.”
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