"A question a day keeps the stupidity away"

January 19, 2010

Veda #19 : Itchy Itchy Mosquito

Day 19
Question by : ? - "Why do we feel itch and need to scratch our skin whenever mosquito bite us?"



General question tonight, maybe some of you've already know the answer to this question.
Mosquito is like a little annoying robot, they can sense us humans. With their antenna, mosquitoes can sense carbon dioxide and lactic acid up to 100 feet away. They can also detect chemicals in sweat. Since people and animals give off lots of carbon dioxide and these other chemicals, it makes it easy for mosquitoes to find us. Whenever a mosquito bite us, it'll left behind the itchy feeling to us, and suddenly we need to scratch it. why would that happen?why suddenly we feel itch?and do we really need to scratch it or not?

So to be clear, the mosquito that usually bite us is the female one. They do this because they use blood as a source of protein. Without a protein snack, a female mosquito cannot lay eggs. So when the mosquito lands, her first thing to do is to stick her long, thin sting into your skin like a needle. She injects a fluid that keeps your blood from coagulating (thickening). Then she sucks up a drop of blood, about five microliters, and stores it in her abdomen. Once she is full, she flies away to lay her eggs.

People probably wouldn't mind this so much, it's not a lot of blood from their body, but there are two problems with mosquitoes. First, diseases. When the mosquito injects this fluid, germs and parasites can enter your body. You could get malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever or West Nile encephalitis. And each of these can be fatal!
The second problem is, the fluid the mosquito injects does not belong in your body. Your immune system makes the area swell so that it can clean out the fluid, that unfortunately "disturb" our skin nerves. The whole clean up process is what makes your skin itch after the bite. So, it's not the mosquito that makes us itch, but our immune system basically.


And do we really need to scratch the itchy part?if it was caused by mosquito, go ahead, don't scratch it too hard though.
but if your skin feel any itch without any mosquitos bite, then don't. Because this itch indicating there is some abnormalities on our skin nerve, scratching it only make it worse because the allergies gonna be spreading, and make your skin wounded.

4 comments:

angsiaufang said...

i hate this creature the most in this whole universe.

emmychen said...

hmm..hmm....
nice explanation!

Novi Irawan said...

apalagi kalo wayah e tidur...ada nyamuk...mosyoolooh nguung nguung e iku lo yang ga tahan...

blu said...

oooo..
*manggut2....*
ak tu kadang2 mbatin..kok isa itchy ya...

greatt postt nup!
lama2...site ini isa jadi nopipedia :D