A while ago I got bedbugs, and this was around the same time I was consuming about 700mgs of caffeine daily. I got to thinking, and I wonder if your blood is riddled with enough chemicals that are toxic to bugs, would they immediately die too? Similarly, if I was drunk out of my mind with the boys, would mosquitoes just die by drinking my blood? Curious about the impact that my lack of health would have on parasites
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If your blood were toxic (ETA: in regards to the question – to insects with either alcohol or caffeine), you’d be already be very dead.
Think about BAC. Around 0.3% is risk of death. A third of a percent of your blood is alcohol, which is awful and dangerous to experience. But as a beverage that’s only like kombucha.
This is oversimplifying because parasites and mosquitoes are smaller and have different metabolisms, but in general, whatever compounds you have in your blood would have to be exposed to you first in a much more massive quantity, and your liver and kidneys are going to get to work to filter it out and keep it out of the general blood.
I don’t know of any human examples, but this is exactly how a lot of anti-tick medications for pets work. Fluralaner (Bravecto) and sarolaner (Simparica) work by making the animal’s blood poisonous to parasites.
This is a common way to treat for fleas and ticks in dogs. Give them a high enough dose of an insecticide that the fleas would die after sucking their blood.
I don’t know of anything like that which is approved for human use, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it existed somewhere.
Yes. Nitisinone and ivermectin are both capable of poisoning mosquitoes when they consume blood from a host that has ingested one or the other.
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I was lying in bed after what would turn out to have been an overdose of chemo, when a mosquito landed on my forearm. I was too ill to dispute with the little guy. I watched him swell up with my blood, and then he just fell over. Fat dead mosquito lay on my arm until I felt well enough to shake his carcass off. True story. Dr in charge of reckoning the dosage had forgotten to divide.