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What to look for in mosquito repellents

Published:Wednesday | May 29, 2024 | 12:06 AM
Mosquitoes cling to the inside of a jar loaded with repellent during a test as part of a tour of the Center for Disease Control laboratory.
AP
Mosquitoes cling to the inside of a jar loaded with repellent during a test as part of a tour of the Center for Disease Control laboratory.

AP:

There’s an old joke that mosquitoes are like family: They are annoying, but they carry your blood.

When a mosquito bites you, it pierces the skin using a mouth-part called a proboscis to suck up blood. As it feeds, it injects saliva into your skin that can cause a reaction – a bump and itching. But the pests can also spread parasites like malaria and viruses like dengue, West Nile and Zika.

So you might want to pause summer vacation planning and consider what to look for in repellents, which keep bugs away from you, and insecticides, which kill them.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that for protection that lasts hours, people should look for mosquito repellents active ingredients like: DEET, IR3535, picaridin, or oil of lemon eucalyptus. Those ingredients are registered with the Environmental Protection Agency. A note about oil of lemon eucalyptus: Lemon eucalyptus essential oil has a similar name, but the agency does not recommend it because it hasn’t been tested for safety and is not registered with EPA as an insect repellent.

Repellents are one line of defence against bugs, but there are others: Wear long sleeves and long pants; Avoid going out at dusk and dawn, when some types of mosquito tend to be most active; and, cover all drums, barrels, tanks, buckets and any other container that is used to store water.

Silvie Huijben, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University, helped develop an online game to help children understand how to protect against mosquitoes, which emphasises another prevention strategy:

“Mosquitoes need water to breed in,” so it’s important to make sure to get rid of standing water – including buckets of water or kiddie pools left undisturbed in the yard for a week or more, she said. “Make sure you’re not the one contributing the local mosquito problem, that you’re not breeding mosquitoes on your property.”

You can also treat clothes and outdoor gear with a pesticide called permethrin to ward off mosquitoes and other unwelcome pests.