Transcript
Turns out, drinking beer might make you more attractive to mosquitoes. Ever notice how after a summer barbecue, you're all covered in mosquito bites, while your friend Steve is bragging about being mosquito-free? We hate Steve. In this study, scientists set out to measure if beer drinking could be the culprit, or one of them. They had people drink either one liter of a beer called dolo, which is only 3% alcohol, or water. They then had them sit shirtless in a tent, where they used fans to pump out the delightful aromas of their bio and bread, into these boxes and tubing, where they had groups of 50 mosquitoes at a time just chilling down wind. They first measured whether or not the pumped air would intrigue the mosquitoes enough to cause them to fly anywhere, which they called activation, as well as what percentage of them flew up the fork where the B-O air came from, as opposed to the outside air fork, and they measured before and afters for each person drinking either substance. Result? Beer drinkers activated 27% more mosquitoes, and were 77% more likely to be the chosen fork, versus the fresh air. the mosquitoes took either fork equally often. They only used one type of beer, but another study found similar results with a different one. Still, we don't know if the effect was due to the alcohol content of the beer or some compound that shared across beers but might not be found in different types of alcohol. More research needed. Until then, think twice before you chug a beer at your next barbecue. Or just make sure Steve drinks more than you.
Additional notes
❓🙋♂️ POLL: Would this have any impact on your own beer drinking habits? TL;DW - Bad News Science for Beer Drinkers - it makes you more attractive to mosquitos 📚 PRIMARY Study: DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009546 SECONDARY STudy: PMID: 12083361 LIMITATIONS: There are different species of mosquitos. Here they used Anopheles gambiae (the primary African malaria vector). The small sample size was enough to show strong statistical significance, but the study population was very uniform: “Burkinabe adult males aged between 20 and 43 years in good health and not using any medication.” There’s already other data showing variability in mosquito attraction to women vs men, and there also could be individual variability based on genetic or environmental factors. #science #beer #barbecue #healthyliving