Study – Mosquitoes love beer drinkers

Ever wonder why your holiday trips always result in a myriad of bright red mosquito bites and yet your friends end up perfectly fine? Lay off the beer.

That’s right, it turns out those irritating, bitey insects love sozzled beer drinkers at the end of the night to the same extent that harassed women hate them.

“Mosquitoes are more attracted to people after they drink a 12-ounce beer. It could be that people breathe a little harder after a cold one or their skin is a little warmer,” Joseph Conlon, a medical entomologist and the technical advisor to the American Mosquito Control Association told US network MSNBC.

If you ask us, mosquitoes are actually just taking advantage of your unfortunate state, knowing full well that you’ll probably miss when you try to swat them away. Mr Conlon probably has a bit more authority though.

The results found that beer drinkers are 15% more likely to be bitten by a mosquito, after the theory was tested on 2,500 Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes in Burkina Faso.

25 volunteers were asked to drink a litre of beer and it was observed afterwards how long it would take and with what veracity the mosquitoes would attack.The insects themselves were then released in boxes of 50.

Sounds like a pretty fun trip – aside from the mosquitoes, obviously.

[Pic via LouriePieterse]