Human blood tastes like salted caramel to mosquitoes, study finds
Have you ever wondered what mosquitoes are tasting when they mercilessly suck your blood?
Well, a team of scientists at Rockefeller University in New York decided to find out. And apparently, human blood tastes like salted caramel to mosquitoes.
The team identified the individual neurons in a mosquito that sense our “distinctive and delectable” flavour.
These neurons are triggered and send electrical impulses when the mosquito slurps blood. It then transmits information about what we taste like.
This piece of information is very important to the scientists. They say they can now develop drugs to mask our blood’s flavour and stop us from being bitten. This drug could be taken before human visit a mosquito infected area.
Now, wouldn’t that be something BUZZ Fam?
Mosquitoes are known to spread diseases malaria and dengue that kill more than half a million people every year.
The team focused on aedes aegypti, breed of mosquitoes for the study, which is a huge threat to human health and transmits several different viruses, including the dengue virus.
The study has been published in the journal Neuron.
