Posted on 10/28/2015 12:46:26 PM PDT by Red Badger
Every summer while preparing for long weekends at our family cabin in the north woods of Minnesota, we'd face the same dilemmas. What food should we bring? Is SPF 50 sunscreen enough protection? And, most importantly, which mosquito repellent should we buy? If we picked the wrong kind, we'd be opening ourselves up to evenings of constant swatting by the campfire and nights of uncontrollable itching. Protection from the unofficial state bird, the mosquito, was not something to take lightly.
However, while itchy limbs might be annoying, Minnesotans don't have much to worry about from mosquitoes, except for the occasional case of West Nile virus or a few other less common diseases. In other parts of the country and the world, more devastating mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and chikungunya are present, so protection from mosquitoes can be a matter of life and death. In these places, making the right decision on a mosquito repellent carries more weight than it does in Minnesota.
To help consumers decide which mosquito repellent they should buy, researchers at New Mexico State University tested 10 commercially available products for their effectiveness at repelling mosquitoes, and the results were published in the Journal of Insect Science. Three of the products (Repel 100 Insect Repellent, OFF Deep Woods Insect Repellent VIII, and Cutter Skinsations Insect Repellent) were mosquito repellents that contained DEET as the active ingredient, and four of the products (Cutter Natural Insect Repellent, EcoSmart Organic Insect Repellent, Cutter Lemon Eucalyptus Insect Repellent, and Avon Skin So Soft Bug Guard) were mosquito repellents that did not contain DEET. The other three products tested were Avon Skin So Soft Bath Oil, Victoria's Secret Bombshell perfume, and Mosquito Skin Patch, a skin patch with vitamin B1 as the active ingredient.
The products were tested against two mosquito species, the yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti) and the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), both known vectors of dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever, and other diseases.
For both species, the researchers found that mosquitoes were strongly repelled by all products containing DEET. For the other products, they found mixed results.
On Aedes aegypti, the mosquito repellents that did not contain DEET either didn't repel them at all or didn't have a repellent effect after just 30 minutes. The exception was Cutter Lemon Eucalyptus Insect Repellent, which had strong repellent effects for the duration of the 240 minute test. The bath oil and perfume effectively repelled mosquitoes for 120 minutes, but the skin patch did not seem to have any repellent effect at any time.
On Aedes albopictus, two of the non-DEET repellents significantly repelled mosquitoes throughout the duration of the study. Furthermore, unlike the resuts for Aedes aegypti, Avon Skin So Soft Bug Guard had significant repellent effects for 120 minutes. The bath oil and skin patch had no repellent effects on Aedes albopictus, but the perfume repelled mosquitoes for 120 minutes, as it did for Aedes aegypti.
"The results of this study show that not all commercially available mosquito repellents are effective in repelling mosquitoes and that efficacy is also dependent on the species of mosquito that is repelled," the authors wrote. "Overall, the results from this study confirm that DEET repellents are the most effective mosquito repellents in the market. Although, based on the results from this study, a lemon-eucalyptus oil containing p-menthane-3,8-diol (PMD) [the active ingredient in Cutter Lemon Eucalyptus Insect Repellent] has similar efficacy to DEET repellents."
Perhaps the most surprising result in the study was the effectiveness of Victoria's Secret Bombshell perfume at repelling mosquitoes.
"Our results challenge the notion that floral perfume-scented sprays, in general, attract mosquitoes," the authors wrote. "Floral fragrances may provide a masking odor resulting in low mosquito attraction rates, but over a shorter duration of time."
However, the authors do provide a caveat to this finding, noting that "the concentration of perfume we used in this test was rather high and that lower concentrations of the same fragrance might have different effects."
Explore further: A natural, alternative insect repellent to DEET
More information: Stacy D. Rodriguez et al. The Efficacy of Some Commercially Available Insect Repellents for (Diptera: Culicidae) and (Diptera: Culicidae) , Journal of Insect Science (2015). DOI: 10.1093/jisesa/iev125
Never heard of them! Good lord, they sound like a Hollywood horror creation!.................
You have to put some honey in there first.
Where I live there are only feral cats who leave everyone alone - deep forests.
If you’re from Minnesota, the skeeters will take the dryer with them.
Go to BugOut.com and check out the shirts. They also come with pants.
Mosquitoes have not been very bad at our house this year.
I kinda miss the old Tom cat. At least he kept the squirrel population down...............
Wow. I am in Oklahoma and SPF 20 is usually overkill for me...
Here in Florida, people from up north really don’t know how powerful our sunlight is, until they look like a lobster on a dinner plate....................
“Sure seems like something could be ingested to make you less palatable to the damn things.”
I take dry garlic tablets to prevent chigger (Arachnid American) bites. If you take it in enough concentration to be able to smell it on your skin, you will have few if any bites.
my guess is that would work for mosquitoes also. I no longer live in a climate where we have enough to bother with repellent.
We used the DEET back when I lived and duck hunted the Gulf coast.
Ditto!
Go to Wisemen Trading and Supply for the mosquito shirts. They have exactly what I have and they work great!
My wife got a B-12 shot several years back. Worked wonders for her for quite a while.
I use Vick’s Vapor Rub. I rub it on my neck and other exposed areas. It always seems to work for me and the jar is small.
Thanks for the pointer and the link, I'll check them out.
Our neighborhood has had a spraying program the last two years and the mosquitoes have been less numerous. The county only sprays when infected mosquitoes are trapped; I think they sprayed only once over in nearby Shepherd Forest.
The cost of our private program is putting our c.c. in Butt Hurt Land, miniature version of Obamaland, and the president of the c.c. isn't standing for reelection. More fun.
Moms with kids favored the spraying; moms with babies were on the other side. </off gross generalizations>
Yeah, I heard that one before. Wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t half true. They do build them big up there.
DDT would be great. I wish they would let me use it.
I went camping in Maine a few years back with a bunch of guys, it was during mosquito season, it was pouring rain, and somehow, someway we decided that was the time to take the advice of someone who thought that Skin So Soft was a valid alternative to regular mosquito spray.
Not only did we get eaten alive, we smelled like French whores, and every single thing that we cooked and ate tasted like Skin So Soft.
I can barely even smell that stuff now without feeling nauseous!
Not my hand....
**
I hope not — girl nails.
Supposedly it’s your blood type.
Way back in the day, they would say to ingest some sulfur which would repel both skitters and ticks.
Don’t remember if it worked.
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