he mentioned the banana angle, but i was hoping he’d mention the garlic one. i do really think the garlic one works.
Freakin’ type O blood. Curse you!
On a serious note, my ex-husband started hallucinating one night after complaining of being ill. He had come down with viral encephalitis, which is caused by a mosquito bite. As we learned more about the disease, he was very lucky to be in good health going into it, as it is deadly to many. Since then, I use DEET products. Do not be swayed by the things that go around social media claiming that “natural” products are the best. DEET is safe and very effective, and mosquitoes are much more than a mere annoyance.
Craig Benzine? I’m sure that’s not a stage name, Mr C6H6. Also, his torch discipline must be weak, there’s a creeper right behind him.
Sucks to be us around a camp fire. How many times have you heard your fellows around the fire remark how lovely and mosquito-free the evening is as you’re madly swatting the little fuckers left and right?
I did try eating lots of garlic on a month-long hike, and couldn’t tell if it was helping or not (too many variables,) As I’ve heard others relate the tactic, you have to eat enough to get the smell of garlic to come out your pores (but if that were the case you could just rub garlic all over yourself, attracting who knows what other critters.)
Every single freakin’ time.
but i would think that a mosquito’s sense of taste would be pretty refined. maybe you don’t have to be able to smell it as a human (with our terrible noses), it only has to be enough for the mosquitos to know about it.
A little googling:
Garlic: Is there an old wives’ tale that doesn’t
feature garlic? According to lore, the pungent-smelling plant can do
everything from cure the common cold to help determine a baby’s sex to
ward off witches.
But though some believe garlic has powerful bug-repellent properties, mosquito control experts say it isn’t very strong.
“Garlic is a classic,” said Joe Conlon, technical advisor for the
American Mosquito Control Association. Some think that eating garlic
could keep mosquitoes away, but he said studies have not shown that
ingesting garlic reduces bug bites.
“As in most myths though, there is an element of truth in them,” he
said. “If you take garlic and squeeze it on your skin, that portion of
your skin will be repellent to mosquitoes for about 20-40 minutes.”
But, then again, he added, you’d be repellent to most everything else too.
(from http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/mosquito-mythbusting-real-repellents-stand/story?id=10543307)
I’d like to see the details of the studies he cites. I have eaten 3 or 4 cloves with dinner and had people say I smelled like garlic the next morning (after showering) so how much did they ingest in the study?
At the risk of getting lynched I might as well admit, I’m one of those lucky fuckers who rarely gets bitten.
Sharing a tent with my brother growing up, I’d wake up with maybe one bite, he’d have about twenty. Given that we were eating the same food at that point, it’s clearly not all down to diet.
Nowadays I’m a smoker, which also seems to dissuade some of the little blighters.
While I hear that the Therapik works, I find that you can get the same effect with the back of a sufficiently warm spoon. Seriously, makes the bite stop itching, and costs exactly nothing (unless you don’t own any spoons, I guess).
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