Beer drinkers are mosquito magnets, according to a festival study

[DBoon]

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-beer-drinkers-mosquito-magnets-festival.html

It's a familiar scene for many of us. A warm summer evening, a gentle breeze and then the inevitable high-pitched whine of a mosquito buzzing near your ear. For some, this is a fleeting annoyance, but for others, it means a night of endlessly scratching itchy welts. Some people are simply mosquito magnets while others emerge relatively unscathed. But why is this so? One explanation, according to scientists from the Netherlands, is beer.

To find out why the blood-sucking critters prefer some people over others, a research team led by Felix Hol of Radboud University Nijmegen took thousands of female Anopheles mosquitoes to Lowlands, an annual music festival held in the Netherlands.

Researchers set up a pop-up lab in connected shipping containers in 2023, and around 500 volunteers took part. First, they filled out a questionnaire about their hygiene, diet and behavior at the festival. Then, to see how attractive they are to mosquitoes, they placed their arm into a custom-designed cage filled with the pesky insects
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Participants who drank beer were 1.35 times more attractive to mosquitoes than those who didn't. The tiny vampires were also more likely to target people who had slept with someone the previous night. The study also revealed that recent showering and sunscreen make people less attractive to the buzzing menace.