Why Mosquitos Buzz In Peoples Ears was one of my favorite books growing up. It’s a cute little story based on an African legend. However, many of us have trouble relating because we don’t often come into contact with mosquitos. Unless we’re camping or traveling, most of us don’t even give these creatures a second thought. Furthermore, the ones we come into contact with are usually harmless. In certain continents however, mosquitos are a huge problem transmitting a spectrum of different diseases. The most affected country is Africa. The issue here is that there is no known vaccine for Malaria, which is the most prominent of the diseases. Other widespread diseases spread by mosquitos are lyme disease ( usually in ticks also ) yellow fever, and encephalitis. Mosquitos can even affect your pets by transmitting heart worms. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there was an estimated 660,000 deaths caused by Malaria in 2012 and 91% of these deaths were in Africa. So why should we care? We are especially at risk whenever we travel because we have absolutely no immunity to the virus. Not only is this disease prominent in Africa, but also Asia, Latin America, The Middle East and Europe, as reported by the World Health Organization. National Geographic reported yesterday, that there may be a new mosquito repellant that is better than all the others. They discovered that mosquitos are attracted to certain odors in your skin, and by offsetting these odors, we could combat this problem. They proved this by performing an experiment where people would stick their hands inside a cage, and after applying the chemical, the mosquitos would no longer touch them and basically not even know that their hands were present. I think the cage serves as a way to deter most confounding variables, but there could still be a few ( the differences in peoples natural odor, etc. ) Although this repellent still isn’t on the market, I think that this is an issue we should really look into and be aware of because most of us hate ticks, cockroaches, and beetles, but tend to assume mosquitos do no harm. So next time you’re at a barbecue enjoying an ice cold beer and get a mosquito bite, be aware that you could actually be infected with a life threatening disease!