Researchers looking for alternative repellents to test
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico: Mary Alice Scott, assistant professor of anthropology and Immo Hansen, associate professor of biology in NMSU’s College of Arts and Sciences have created an online survey to discover people’s homemade mosquito repellents.
They hope to get responses from all over the world.
“This project aims to find techniques and strategies that people in different parts of the world use to protect themselves from mosquitoes,” said Hansen. “You know the story of Victoria’s Secret Bombshell perfume.” Hansen referred to the testing of mosquito repellent sprays conducted in Hansen’s Molecular Vector Physiology Lab in 2014 in which the perfume out performed some commercial mosquito repellents. The perfume’s mosquito repellent success gave him the idea of looking for more do-it-yourself bug sprays to test. He contacted Scott, a medical anthropologist at NMSU whose research interests include the examination of health and illness production, to collaborate on the project.
“I’m a qualitative researcher so the idea is that once we have a better sense of what’s out there that we would go to different places in the Americas and actually do more in depth interviews with people,” Scott said. “It’s difficult to design the interviews unless we know a little bit more about what’s out there.” — Newswise