A study of festivalgoers suggests that drinking beer and sharing a bed makes you more attractive to mosquitoes
By James Woodford
12 September 2025
Mosquitoes may not bite indiscriminately
hugh sturrock/Alamy
Hedonists who drink beer, don’t wash, share a bed and eschew sunscreen may be more attractive to mosquitoes – at least, that’s what a study of festivalgoers found.
For their Mosquito Magnet Trial, Sara Lynn Blanken at Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and her colleagues visited the 2023 Lowlands Festival, near Amsterdam. They asked 465 attendees to complete a questionnaire about their health, diet, hygiene, sunscreen application, any substance use, blood type and whether they had slept alone the night before.
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The team also set up a makeshift laboratory in shipping containers, containing 1700 captive-reared mosquitoes , which can transmit malaria.
Between 20 and 35 mosquitoes were put into a series of clear plastic containers with a perforated divider separating the participants’ arms from the insects, so they could attempt to land on the revellers, but not actually bite them.
The researchers counted how many times the mosquitoes tried to land on the festivalgoers’ arms in three minutes compared with a decoy of cotton pads soaked in glucose.