"The mosquitos go crazy, hungry for blood..."

[Bob Of Burleson]

In London,
An Underground Home
For The World’s Mosquitoes

Ari Shapiro / NPR

You can't hear it over the noise of London's traffic. But it's there. That faint, whining hum. Right under my feet, thousands of mosquitoes are dining on human blood.

To visit them, you have to go through a sliding glass door into the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This school started as a hospital on the Thames River, where doctors treated sailors returning from faraway places with strange parasites.

Today, the building holds countless exotic diseases that you hope you'll never catch. The mosquitoes carry just a few of them, and their keeper is an entomologist named Dr. James Logan.

To get to them, you have to go underground, then through two sets of doors and a net, and into the restricted access room.

"We don't want any mosquitoes to escape onto the streets of London, obviously, because we've got tropical mosquitoes here," says Logan.

. . .

Clear plastic boxes line the walls, each one holding hundreds of mosquitoes. Some are from Pakistan, others from Tanzania. There are mosquitoes that can carry West Nile virus and Dengue Fever.

The really dangerous ones live in a different room though. When you jostle a box, the mosquitoes go crazy, hungry for blood.

. . .

Malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. This lab is doing research that could help lower that number. It's the reason people call Dr. Logan the mosquito slayer.

He cultivates these insects to learn how better to obliterate them on a massive scale.

COMPLETE STORY

[BillB]

If he's figuring out how to kill skeeters, he's doing God's work.
Those things eat me alive.

[Bob Of Burleson]

Are women more attractive to mosquitoes?

AU.Lifestyle.Yahoo.com

Have you ever wondered why mosquitoes seem to zero in on some people but steer well clear of others?
According to a study by world mosquito expert, Dr James Logan, there are a number of factors that determine whether they view you as dinner or not.

It seems that women are more attractive to mosquitoes than men, but it could be for the simple reason that they usually have more bare flesh on display.

However, Dr Logan says the main reason they are attracted to some people more than others comes down to smell. He told the UK's Daily Mail, 'They hear and detect moisture and temperatures, but the sense of smell is most important and we all smell slightly different.’

Dr Logan found that pregnant women are a prime target for mosquitoes, with studies showing they get twice as many bites as women who are not pregnant. During pregnancy, women go through a change in skin odour because of hormonal changes which can make them smell sweeter to mosquitoes. Pregnant women also have an increased body temperature which generally draws in the pesky insects.

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[GRANDPA]

Oh, great. Another cheesy Scy-Fy movie. Skeeternado. You just hide & watch.