Anopheles gambiae

In PLoSOne, Thierry Lefèvre et al report on an experiment examining the effects of beer consumption on how attractive people are to mosquitos:

We explored the effect of beer consumption on human attractiveness to a natural population of An. gambiae using a Y-olfactometer designed to accommodate total body emanations as a source of odour stimuli. We found that beer consumption not only enhanced the number of mosquitoes that engage in odour-mediated upwind flight (mosquito activation) but also enhanced the strength of their odour-mediated anemotactic response (mosquito orientation). Mosquito activation and orientation are important parts of the natural host-seeking process of An. gambiae and any increases in these behaviours will facilitate vector-human contacts. Water consumption did not affect these mosquito behavioural responses, demonstrating that beer was solely responsible for increased human attractiveness. To the best of our knowledge, this study provides the first evidence that beer consumption increases human attractiveness to An. gambiae, which is the principal vector of malaria in Africa.

The experiment compared subjects that had drunk a sorghum-based beer from Burkina Faso, where the study was conducted, with subjects who had drunk water. Perhaps local researchers should try to replicate this experiment using Australian beers, with liqueur and spirit drinkers as a second control group in addition to the water drinkers, as well as using Aedes aegypti as the mosquito..