WHY DO MOSQUITOES BITE SOME PEOPLE MORE THAN OTHER ?

Blood type, metabolism, exercise, shirt colour and even drinking beer can make person so delicious to mosquitoes

You’re not alone. An estimated 20 percent of people, it turns out, are more delicious for mosquitoes, and get bit more often than normal.  while scientists don’t yet have a cure for the ailment, other than preventing bites with insect repellent.  They do have a number of ideas regarding why some of us are more prone to bites than others. Here are some of the factors that could play a role:

Blood Type

As mosquitoes bite us to harvest proteins from our blood—research shows that they find certain blood types are more tasty than others. One study found that in a controlled setting, mosquitoes landed on people with Type O blood nearly twice as often as those with Type A. People with Type B blood fell somewhere in the middle of this itchy spectrum. Additionally, based on other genes, about 85 percent of people secrete a chemical signal through their skin that indicates which blood type they have, while 15 percent do not, and mosquitoes are also more attracted to secretors than

Carbon Dioxide

Mosquitoes locate their targets is by smelling the carbon dioxide emitted in their breath—they use an organ called a maxillary palp. With the help of it can detect carbon dioxide from as far as 164 feet away. As a result, people who simply exhale more of the gas over time—generally, larger people—have been shown to attract more mosquitoes than others. This is one of the reasons why children get bit less often than adults, on the whole.

Exercise and Metabolism

In addition to carbon dioxide, mosquitoes find victims at closer range by smelling the lactic acid, uric acid, ammonia and other substances expelled via their sweat, and are also attracted to people with higher body temperatures. Because strenuous exercise increases the buildup of lactic acid and heat in your body, it likely makes you stand out to the insects. Meanwhile, genetic factors influence the amount of uric acid and other substances naturally emitted by each person, making some people more easily found by mosquitos than others.

Beer
Just a single 12-ounce bottle of beer can make you more attractive to the insects, one study found. But even though researchers had suspected this was because drinking increases the amount of ethanol excreted in sweat, or because it increases body temperature, neither of these factors were found to correlate with mosquito landings, making their affinity for drinkers something of a mystery.

Pregnancy

In different studies, pregnant women have been found to attract roughly twice as many mosquito bites as others, likely a result of the fact the unfortunate confluence of two factors: They exhale about 21% carbon dioxide and are on average about 1.26 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than others.

Clothing Colour

This one might seem absurd, but mosquitoes use vision (along with scent) to locate humans, so wearing colours that stand out (black, dark blue or red) may make you easier to find, at least according to James Day, a medical entomologist

Genetics

As a whole, underlying genetic factors are estimated to account for 85% of the variability between people in their attractiveness to mosquitoes—regardless of whether it’s expressed through blood type, metabolism, or other factors. Unfortunately, we don’t (yet) have a way of modifying these genes.