Comment by siliconc0w
7 days ago
You can also try a simple fan blowing over the sitting areas, mosquitos (and other bugs) have difficulty flying in the breeze. I sometimes bring a small fan camping since the breeze is nice and I hate applying deet.
7 days ago
You can also try a simple fan blowing over the sitting areas, mosquitos (and other bugs) have difficulty flying in the breeze. I sometimes bring a small fan camping since the breeze is nice and I hate applying deet.
I love DEET. It is absolutely the perfect way to avoid mosquitos and ticks.
At home though, I use Thermacell. It's the only thing I have ever used that makes a measurable difference. Of course, you need to have one ever four or five feet unless the air is perfectly still but that's a small price.
Deet works on most things except deer flies. One bite is usually enough to itch for hours. They feed during the daytime.
"Their mouthparts include two pairs of cutting "blades" that lacerate skin and cause flow of blood out of the wound, which females lap up with a sponge-like mouthpart."
https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/publichealth/insects/taban...
Having lived in places were mosquitos thrive, I 100% agree with you.
I keep bottles and sachets of OFF's DEEP WOODS DEET fueled repellant in my car, book bags, its a must-have.
DEET is super effective, especially if you go to an outdoors store like REI and get the extremely concentrated 95% DEET they make for backpackers. Will it give me cancer on 20 years? Who knows. But it does work.
Deet works just fine and is safe for us, but Picaridin works just as well and is safe for dogs. Thermacells are putting a pyrethroid into vapor. Flat out its a neurological toxin, its just a matter of dose. I use one now and again but I can't help remember all the early onset parkinsons diagnoses, and how those cases are going up.
FWIW, I have found that icaridin-based repellents also work. It's dramatically less unpleasant than DEET!
(If you find that a fan works, that's even better! But I never really find these environmental interventions are good enough, they always get me at some point regardless)
Icaridin generally doesn't last as long as DEET though.
For fans, I have seen people make mosquito traps by attaching a bug net to a fan, sometimes combined with a CO2 generator as bait. I don't know how effective it is in practice. What we do sometimes is to put a fan under the table, it helps a little against low flying mosquitoes, definitely not as effective as DEET though.
Fans work great as long as you’re in the path of the fan. Mosquitoes are not very strong flyers. I use them with my hot tub because when I’m in there I’m not moving around.
The problem, of course, is that the path of a fan is huge and how many fans are you really going to have around?
Yeah exactly. If I move elsewhere for like 30s I'll get bitten. Or my ankles will be exposed or something.
Same with incense-style repellents, I'm pretty convinced they reduce the number of mosquitoes but eventually one will be attracted to me via some path where the repellent isn't currently flowing and I'll get bitten regardless. (I think that smoke is also probably pretty bad for you if you use it a lot, too).
And since the difference between one bite and zero bites is a really big deal I usually just go for on-skin repellents.