A study reveals a surprising fact in which mosquitoes can study the situation in the hunt for human prey.
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| Anopheles mosquito. (Picture from: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/) |
The study was conducted by scientists from France. They studied the behavior of mosquitoes before and after the use of insecticide-treated bed nets from two rural villages in Africa. Malaria kills more than 650,000 people a year, according to the World Health Organization - most of them babies and children in sub-Saharan Africa.
As a result, mosquitoes change their schedules peaks attacks on humans. If before they were attacked at about 02:00 until 03:00 dawn, is now turning into a mosquito at 05:00, in the early morning that the villagers went to the garden before the sun shines.
Not only that, the number of mosquitoes that attack when the population is outside the home also rose sharply. As reported by Yahoo, in a study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, bites outdoors initially accounted for only about 45 percent of all mosquito bites. But after the use of nets, the number of bites out of the house rose up to 68 percent within one year before declining to 61 percent within three years.
Senior researcher, Vincent Corbel from Montpellier, France-based Institute of Research for Development says the findings are very worrying, because the villagers usually get up before dawn to work in their garden, it makes them can not be protected from mosquitoes. *** [GI | PIKIRAN RAKYAT 11102012]
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