Drinking beer can make you more attractive to mosquitoes

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Enjoying a cold beer on a hot day may lead to itchy skin.

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Not because of the drink but the mosquitoes hovering around and about to sting you.

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Researchers in the Netherlands set up shipping containers as a pop-up laboratory at Lowlands, one of the biggest music festivals in the country, in August 2023.

Those who were willing to take part in the Mosquito Magnet Trial, more than 500 volunteers, filled out a questionnaire about their diet, hygiene, drug and alcohol use, and behaviour before the test subjects placed their arms inside a special cage containing female mosquitoes. The insects could smell the skin but were unable to sting through the tiny holes.

“The Mosquito Magnet Trial, to our knowledge the largest study of its kind, was conducted in a loosely controlled setting with a selection bias towards science loving festivalgoers,” researchers wrote in the study published at bioRxiv.org.

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A camera tracked how many of the bugs landed on the cage and a computer tabulated the score for each individual.

The team noticed that those who drank beer were 1.35 times more likely to be bitten. In addition, smoking weed and sleeping with someone also boosted people’s magnetism to the insects.

“You’d hear loud cheers when a score popped up on the scoreboard,” Felix Hol, a quantitative biologist at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, told Science Direct.

Conversely, researchers noted that people who showered recently and used sunscreen were about half as attractive to mosquitoes.

“They simply have a taste for the hedonists among us,” the researchers jokingly concluded.

Hol said not to read too much into the results due to its loose controls than what would normally be done in a lab.

But he added that if people want to avoid being stung, “don’t drink beer, don’t smoke weed, don’t sleep with people and put on your sunscreen.”

And if that is not possible?

“You can do whatever you want and put on long sleeves,” Hol said.

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