Common insect repellent now attracts mosquitoes — signaling a ‘blood meal’ for bugs: study
Recent research indicates that the common insect repellent Deet may actually attract mosquitoes instead of repelling them. This study suggests that mosquitoes can associate the scent of Deet with a food source, leading them to seek it out in future encounters. Experts emphasize the need to understand this behavior for future mosquito control strategies.
- ▪Deet has been shown to potentially attract mosquitoes due to their association with it as a food source.
- ▪In a study, 60% of mosquitoes that had previously fed while exposed to Deet attempted to bite again when exposed to just Deet.
- ▪Mosquitoes have demonstrated impressive learning abilities, which may affect their response to repellents like Deet.
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| Original publisher | New York Post |
| Canonical URL | https://nypost.com/2026/05/29/science/deet-insect-repellant-may-now-attract-mosquitoes-study/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 15:12:56 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T19:15:02.726Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T19:15:02.726Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Z4kcNtVFRI4x |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Wildlife Common insect repellent now attracts mosquitoes — signaling a ‘blood meal’ for bugs: study By Allison Lax Published May 29, 2026, 3:12 p.m. ET See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google Research now shows that mosquitoes may bite the hand that feeds them Deet — at least in time. The commonly used chemical — which is the gold standard ingredient approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to act as a mosquito repellent — has recently been shown to potentially attract the pesky insects, as they’ve come to associate the chemical with a fleshy meal.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at New York Post.
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