Sweet skin, blood type, sweating… Mosquitoes seem to enjoy biting some people more than others. Explanations.
While some people are covered in mosquito pimples, others emerge from the summer without a single sting. How to explain the preference of these flying insects for an individual and not its neighbor? The reasons, according to the Tiger Mosquito Information Portal, are varied.
Mosquito skins?
It is not really a question of skin for the mosquito. Rather, it is physiological mechanisms, varying from person to person. Depending on the amount of CO2 that you give off, sex, clothes and your body odor (particularly linked to food).
Mosquitoes love the smell of sweat. That’s why when you play sports or when it’s particularly hot, you’ll be more prone to getting bitten. Doctissimo, based on work published on the Springer Link platform, explains that lactic acida compound naturally produced by the muscle during physical exercise, is attractive to mosquitoes. Body heat also attracts these flying insects.
Thus, “sick people also produce more heat because the body’s temperature produces more heat when fighting an infection”, which attracts the mosquito more, according to Mosquito-Tiger-Info.
Pregnant women more prone to being bitten
Mosquitoes are attracted to CO2, a molecule produced in greater quantities by a pregnant woman. Carbon dioxide is more present, also, in a person whose body mass is higher, because the surface of production of the molecule is higher.
Beware of injections if you are blood group A or O
In 2004, scientists found in the Journal of Medical Entomology that people with blood types A and O were more likely to be bitten by mosquitoes than those with type B.
Finally, mosquitoes detect danger, according to a recent study, and are less likely to bite people who try to chase them away, according to Mosquito-Tiger-Info. Researchers from the University of Washington, the University of California and the California Institute of Technology found that the neurotransmitter dopamine was responsible for this phenomenon in these insects. They will remember your scent, and try less to sting you.