Comment: I have been a mosquito magnet since I was a little girl. I have a small frame, hardly exercise and have low basel body temperature!! I'll be covered with 4, 5 bites when my husband, who has a much larger body frame and exercises regularly doesn't get one. Scientist, work harder on your theory!!
Comment: Comment: Can someone please explain "artificially sweet-scented bodies." Does this mean that people who have a large intake of sugars are more likely to be attractive to mosquitoes?
Artificially sweet-scented bodies refers to the use of body lotion, sun tan creams and/or colognes and perfumes. Yes, diet does have an effect on our level of mosquito attraction. Check out a book called "Sugar Blues" by William Dufty.
Comment: Does anyone know the meaning of "artificially sweet-scented bodies"? Are there any links between diet (maybe intake of sugars) and mosquito bites? Thanks for posting
Comment: Can someone please explain "artificially sweet-scented bodies." Does this mean that people who have a large intake of sugars are more likely to be attractive to mosquitoes? Do you know of any links where I can find info about the connection between mosquito bites and diet?
Comment: Did you know that if McCain is elected you will have to pay income tax on the value of the medical insurance that your employer gives you? Worse still, he is offering a tax break for people who pay their own insurance, BUT only $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families.
Let's say you have a family of four. Your insurance policy costs would be at least $1,500-2,500 per month under a self-pay plan, which cost more than employer group plans. So, you pay $18,000 -$30,000 per year for insurance, and you get to deduct only $5,000 of that. If you paid $25,000 for you insurance, you would be out of pocket $20,000 per year. This is FAR WORSE than the current system, where if you are self employed you can deduct 100% of you medical insurance costs.
So, if you're not self employed, you would stick with your Employer's plan. Employer plans for a family of four have a value of $900-$1,500 per month totaling 10,800-$18,000 per year. Surprise! On April 15th, you owe tax on all of that as INCOME to you. Say your bracket is 25%, and the value of your Employer medical plan is $14,000. You will OWE THE IRS an additional $3,500, and that's ON TOP of whatever monthly premium you already pay to your employer for your insurance.
Many analysts say that McCain's new rules would encourage employers to stop offering health benefits. If that happened, then far fewer Americans would be insured than are insured today, because what family of four can afford $18,000-$30,000 out of pocket per year for self-pay health insurance?
Furthermore, McCain's plan does not require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions of people who self-pay their insurance. People under employer group plans have all of their pre-existing conditions covered. This is a hugely unfair aspect of the current system. Insurance companies can afford to cover the pre-existing conditions of the much larger pool of people with group insurance, but they refuse to pay the pre-existing conditions on the smaller pool of self-pay customers. They have been allowed to price gouge the self-pay customers, which is a form of market manipulation that should be illegal.
So let's say one of your kids had diabetes and you have high blood pressure, then your employer stops offering insurance. You now have to buy your own, but you and your child are INELIGIBLE due to pre-existing conditions. Oh, yeah, they will let you buy the insurance, but you can't use it for any pre-existing condition until you have paid on time every month for two years. And you know what happens at one year and 11 months? You get a letter saying your policy has been cancelled. I have many patients this has happened to.
McCain's plan SUCKS.
It does nothing to help middle class working Americans afford or obtain medical insurance. In fact, it makes the current system WORSE.
Comment: Fascinating hypothesis...but a non sequitur given the topic of this thread.
Comment: Fortunately or unfortunately for some of you, I may be the exception to a lot of rules....... We live in the White Mountain of NH and I play golf 5 times a week, I wear perfume everyday, playing golf or being outside or not, I am type "O" positive AND I do not get bit...... MY husband who is also a type "O" positive on the other hand sprays himself with Skin so Soft or any other antibug spray gets eaten alive...... So some of the theory is up in the air..... please explain.
Call me lucky
Comment: Thank you, Flattoe, for providing that valuable information. I work in an admininstrative capacity for an office of the EPA, and trust me, these dedicated individuals have more to do than dream up and submit recommendations for Congress to regulate substances without any factual basis. It doesn't work that way. DDT is very toxic...killing birds, insects, fish, getting into our streams, rivers and lakes--basically, the food chain of our very existence. Rachael Carson brought this to light. When are we going to wake up and stop "messing" in our nest for the sake of convenience? Some of this stuff can't be fixed!
(As a side note on mosquitoes: I got an email that indicated listerine works as a good mosquito repellent...used in a spray bottle, you can spray it around your entryways to keep them out of the house as well.)
Comment: Correct...large scale DDT spraying is environmentally deleterious. I would hope NO one is recommending we revisit that argument. Malaria has largely been eradicated from the US.
With regards to the DEVOLOPING WORLD, DDT spraying in targeted amounts (perhaps home-based?) would seem to be an efficacious solution to an endemic problem.
Comment: ragnar30066---You are an idiot. You lack any amount of good sense or basis of fact for your argument. Please go spread your propaganda with the cirlce of jerks you hang out with instead of publicly posting where people actually spend 2 minutes looking up information to discredit you.
For anyone interested in a fact based analysis of DDT use, politics and Malaria please go to the following website: http://info-pollution.com/ddtban.htm. For those who do not want to take the time, the following is an excerpt with solid factual information on the relation between DDT (or lack thereof) and the resurgence of Malaria:
"Incredible as it might seem, while public health officials were cautiously limiting the usage of DDT, it was being used in increasing amounts in agriculture, especially on cotton, a cash crop (Chapin & Wasserstrom). This heavy use led to resistance among malaria carrying mosquitoes throughout the tropics. In this instance, the unwise use of DDT, rather than improving life, actually resulted in a resurgence of malaria. According to Chapin & Wasserstrom (page 183) "Correlating the use of DDT in El Salvador with renewed malaria transmission, it can be estimated that at current rates each kilo of insecticide added to the environment will generate 105 new cases of malaria."
Not surprisingly, anti-environmentalists ignore or downplay the importance of insect resistance. There is no mention of the problem in Trashing the Planet, Eco-Sanity or Facts not Fear. Toxic Terror, which has a twenty six page chapter on "The DDT Debate", devotes just one paragraph to the issue. There is no mention of the impact of DDT resistance on the war against malaria.
There were a number of other problems in addition to insect resistance to DDT and other insecticides. The heavy use of anti-malaria drugs started to produce microbes resistant to them. Non insecticide control measures that had greatly reduced the presence of malaria in many areas were discontinued when DDT arrived (Chapin & Wasserstrom). There was a chronic lack of funds. Many countries had to abandon their control efforts, or they diverted funds to other areas when the number of cases of malaria had been reduced to a low level."
You are welcome.....
Love and Kisses---Flattoe
Comment: Please note that even the World Health Organization gives a reluctant thumbs up to TARGETED DDT use. The primary reasons: cost and effectiveness. I am NOT postulating that DDT is the pefect solution..it just happens to be the best solution at present. Please read the WHO's position:
http://www.who.int/malaria/docs/IRS/DDT/DDTposition.pdf
Comment: First of all, you're not going to win too many people over to your argument by name-calling. That being said, if it's cathartic for you, then have it. I read over ragnar's post and found it to be generalized and simplistic. Please note, however, that I found no factual inaccuracies in his post.
I am not denying that indiscriminate spraying of DDT is deleterious to wildlife/environment and can lead to vector resistance issues. Nonetheless, targeted use in the home would seem to be effective from a cost and practical standpoint. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DEEDA1738F932A25757C0A9629C8B63&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=5
The link you provided also contains another link at the bottom titled "Putting Myths to Bed". Here is the URL if anyone wants to visit it directly http://kenethmiles.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_kenethmiles_archive.html#107570569615970184
The doctor quoted corroborates this nuance. He IS speaking out against individuals who make a blanket indictment against environmentalists. To claim environmentalist caused millions of deaths due to malaria resurgence is, I agree, fatuous. In summation, the TARGETED, SPECIFIC developing world use of DDT as an anti-malarial seems to me a defensible position. The LARGE-SCALE spraying programs are ineffective and environmentally irresponsible.
Comment: Thank you, Flattoe, for taking the time to rectify the NONSENSE posted by Ragnar, who seems like one more narrow-minded ignoramus who will vote for John McCain. (Sorry, I just had to say that.)
I'm a physician and have done extensive work in the tropics. Malaria is a HUGE scorge in the developing world. The USA is so cocooned, we have no idea what life is really like for most humans on this planet. And while Western medicine has done so much good in the developing world, at the same time the Western chemical industries are rapidly counteracting the good we do. Agricultural chemicals and deforestation are destroying soil and worsening air and water quality. And once we discovered that DDT is so harmful, the Western corporations continued to manufacture it for sale in the developing world, where the laws were less stringent. "Not in my backyard" really needs to pertain to the ENTIRE PLANET. We may speak different languages and worship different gods, be we all share one irreplaceable ecosystem.
From an anecdotal point of view, over the years I've noticed that skeeters like women more than men, prefer fair skinned to dark skinned people, and will always go after the newcomer. Natives rarely get more than a few bites, visitors can turn into one huge welt within hours.
Thanks again, Flattoe, for your information. You're the best.
Comment: Please illuminate for me what part of ragnar's post was "nonsense". Thanks.
Comment: Thanks be to the Environmental Protection Agency which put itself on the map with the ban on DDT. That chemical reduced the millions of lives lost every year to malaria to a mere handful worldwide. Since it has been banned, the lives lost to maleria has crept steadily back up, and once again is in the millions annually. The EPA has yet to demonstrate a single life lost due to DDT anywhere, ever.
When government gets too big, it creates a bigger problem than the problem it was intended to resolve.
Comment: Interesting theory, regarding blood types....I am a type "O" positive, and a veritable mosquito feast! I'm neither large nor pregnant, but these pests have plagued me since I was the child...my entire family can all be outside, and they might get one or two bites to my eight or ten....
Comment: I have spoken with a number of like-afflicted mosquito magnets and have found a correlation in blood types. I'm an ONeg, and wonder if that has anything to do with the chemistry of attraction?
Comment: They haven't learned if perfumes and colognes attract mosquitoes? These scientists spend a lot of times indoors or otherwise they'd see that it does. It's simple science: Go outside without perfume or any type of scent on you like special body wash, see how bit up you get. Do the same thing but put some perfume on, see how bit up you get then. You learn even in boy scouts not to wear cologne or anything. I learned the hard way. But whenever I put on cologne, which is rare, then the mosquitoes come after me. The scientists need to come down here to Florida and play with our mosquitoes. It's swamp land and they LOVE water puddles so we got a ton of them. Or go to Mississippi and they'll see some big ones. Also, Skin-So-Soft works to an extent. Even this we're taught in Boy Scouts.Something with DEET works best but SOS will last you forever and is great at softening the skin since your skin can get really scaley and tore-up out there. But SOS evaporates quickly, like in less than an hour. So you have to constantly reapply it.
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