New Mosquitoe repellant

[Tom Rankin]

A new patch could shield you from mosquitoes by sending out chemical compounds. It still needs to pass testing before becoming available in the US. Until then, avoid wearing red, breathing heavily, holding a beer (just holding? ), being pregnant, or having lots of bacteria on your skin.

No wonder mosquitoes are attracted to hikers!

Complete Article:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechcon...=tw&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

 

[JCarter]

I've mastered the art of not being pregnant. but you'll pry my beer from my cold, dead, mosquito-bitten hands.

 

[TCD]

Well, at least the article adds value with one of the better high res pix of a mosquito that I've seen. Would have been nice to know what the "chemical" is in the patch...probably just DEET.

 

[TCD]

I did read the FAQs, and I want to believe, too. But the cynic in me says it's certainly blurry:

"The Kite Mosquito Patch utilizes active ingredients that are approved and considered safe by the United States Food and Drug Administration for human consumption."
but
"...as long as there is no risk of the child eating the sticker itself. That would obviously not be safe." "...no one should eat or lick the Kite Patch."

or is it

"It uses non-toxic, spatial compounds that – while safe for human consumption/contact..."
but
"Kite Patch is designed for clothing, not skin...Kite is NOT a skin patch."

The fancier the presentation, the more suspicious I am. But I hope they are right; if this is all true, it would be a boon in a lot of areas, and a convenience to all of us.

 

[hikerbrian]

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it actually is NOT just a DEET patch. Anasankar Ray, one of the scientists who owns the intellectual property that Kite is founded on, has authored several studies on insect olfaction, a couple of which have landed in the journal Nature (kind of a big deal in the world of science). In those and other papers , Ray describes how his team isolated the specific chemoreceptors responsible for detection of CO2 and other odorants, and then screened a bunch of chemical compounds against those receptors to see if they could find novel chemicals that would activate the CO2 receptors (could be used as bate) or inhibit the CO2 receptors (could be used as repellent since the skeeters wouldn't be able to detect a person exhaling). The best blend they found (or more accurately, disclosed in the paper - we don't know what is in Kite, the patent hasn't issued yet, I don't think) was 2,3-butanedione, 1-butanal, 1-pentanal, and 1-hexanal. This blend had the unique feature of eliciting a very prolonged response from the chemo-receptors - on the order of minutes. The theory is that mosquitos are able to detect pulses of exhaled CO2 and other odorants and use that pulse information to track their prey. But if their CO2 detectors are going crazy and detecting what they think is loads and loads of CO2 for minutes or longer at a time, the mosquitoes can no longer track their prey - they think they're positively swimming in the stuff, even if the humans walked away minutes ago.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. In one of the Nature papers, Ray and company conducted "semi-field tests" in which they measured mosquito trapping in huts equipped either with CO2 off-gassing equipment alone, or CO2 off-gassing equipment as well as these odorants. The latter traps contained about half as many mosquitoes.

You could imagine that only downwind mosquitoes would be confused, and you could imagine that a patch just won't emit enough of the stuff to matter, and you could imagine that the stuff actually smells worse than DEET...but I'm actually cautiously optimistic with this one. The idea, at least, is pretty good IMO.

Oh, and for any of you that are able to access it, the most relevant paper is, "Ultra-prolonged activation of CO2-sensing neurons disorients mosquitoes" Nature, 2011.