Altering our ‘FLAVOUR’ could stop mosquitoes attacking – helping fight malaria and Zika
The pests use their sense of taste and smell to choose their victims, and if scientists can identify what repels them from some people they could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year
BY altering the 'flavour' of human beings, scientists believe they can help prevent mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria.
The aim is to identify what it is that makes some of us taste unpleasant to the pests, scientists said.
By doing so, they hope to encourage mossies to leave us alone, and instead keep the diseases they carry to themselves.
If successful, experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, say the technique could save an estimated 450,000 lives each year from malaria alone.
They believe a special part of the mosquito brain mixes tastes and smells to create unique and preferred flavours.
Malaria is an infectious parasite disease, transmitted by the bite of the female Anopheles gambiae mosquito.
In 2015, experts estimate it affected 214 million people, mostly in Africa, despite decades of mosquito eradication and control efforts.
Our goal is to let the mosquitoes tell us what smells they find repulsive and use those to keep them from biting us
Dr Christopher Potter, Johns Hopkins University
There is no malaria vaccine, and although the disease is curable in early stages, treatment is costly and difficult to deliver in places where it is endemic.
Dr Christopher Potter, an assistant professor in neuroscience at the unviersity, said: "All mosquitoes, including the one that transmits malaria, use their sense of smell to find a host for a blood meal.
"Our goal is to let the mosquitoes tell us what smells they find repulsive and use those to keep them from biting us."
As part of their experiments to better understand how mosquitoes smell out humans, Dr Potter's team made a surprising discovery.
They found the messages in the mosquitoes' brains not only picked up our smell, as previously thought, but also a human's taste.
Dr Potter explained: "Our findings suggest that perhaps mosquitoes don't just like our smell, but also our flavour.
"It's likely that the odorants coming off our skin are picked up by the labella (a part of the mosquito) and influence the preferred taste of our skin, especially when the mosquito is looking for a place to bite."
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He said the finding could offer scientists a new way of repelling mosquitoes.
The potential new technique would help "reduce the likelihood they come too close", by targeting smell.
And another repellent could, in the event the mosquito does get too close, "make them turn away in disgust - before sucking our blood", Dr Potter said.
He added: "We hope to find an odorant that is safe and pleasant-smelling for us but strongly repellent to mosquitoes at very low concentrations."
A report on the research appeared online on October 3 in the journal Nature Communications.