Stinky feet attract mosquitoes

What do mosquitoes like more than clean, human skin? Stinky socks.

Scientists think the musky odor of human feet can be used to attract and kill mosquitoes that carry deadly malaria. The Gates Foundation announced on Wednesday that it will help fund one such pungent project in Tanzania.

Dutch scientist Dr. Bart Knols first discovered mosquitoes were attracted to foot odor by standing in a dark room naked and examining where he was bitten. Dr. Fredros Okumu of Tanzania’s Ifakara Health Institute replicated the smell using a careful blend of eight chemicals and experimented with it in traps.

Okumu will use the $775,000 Gates grant to conduct more research on how the traps should be used and whether they can be produced affordably.

Although the global infection rate of malaria is going down, there are still more than 220 million new cases of malaria each year. The U.N. estimates almost 800,000 of those people die. Most of them are children in Africa.

              Source Chicago Sun-Times