With the arrival of summer, in addition to the heat, the hated mosquitoes also appear and do not hesitate to bite us during the day or night and leave us with a welt as a souvenir. But this also generates a lot of uncertainty in many homes, since of two people who sleep in the same room, the next morning, one is riddled with bites and the other is intact.
What was thought. For decades, popular culture has attributed this phenomenon to having “sweet blood” or a certain blood group. However, science has left the guesswork behind to offer a much more precise answer by boiling it all down to the chemistry of our skin.
The real magnet. The research that has marked a before and after in this field It was published in 2022 in the prestigious magazine Cell. In this article, after meticulously analyzing human skin odor, they discovered that people who are most attractive to species such as mosquitoes Aedes aegypti produce levels significantly higher carboxylic acids in the emanations of his skin.
The most revealing thing about this finding is not only the identification of the chemical compound, but its persistence, since the study demonstrated that this chemical difference remains stable over the years. That is, our olfactory signature is constant and, if you are a magnet for mosquitoes today, it is very likely that your skin will continue to emit these same signals in the future.
He is quite faithful. This biological mechanism is tremendously sophisticated, since, far from choosing their victims at random, mosquitoes are perfectly adapted to track down these compounds. A study published in 2023 in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases reinforced This is evidenced by analyzing the olfactory receptors of these insects, confirming that they are specifically designed to detect human carboxylic acids.
Faced with this, deep-rooted myths such as blood group lose strength and although there is literature on the matter, current scientific evidence shows that it is a much more variable and noticeably less determining factor than our skin odor profile.
There are more factors. As important as our body odor is, the attraction of mosquitoes does not depend on a single switch. As detailed a 2024 scientific review, The sting process is multifactorial and requires a precise combination of signals.
Precisely, before smelling the acids on our skin, mosquitoes need to know that we are there. To do this, the carbon dioxide that we exhale when breathing and our body temperature act as the first long and medium distance location radar. Later, when the mosquitoes are already in our environment, the carboxylic acids in the skin come into play.
There is more. Complementary variables related to the state of the host that wants to bite are added to this biological equation. For example, pregnancy has been identified as a context in which some people may be more attractive to mosquitoes, acting as an additional factor that adds to the individual’s basal chemistry.
Image | National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
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