FORT COLLINS, Colo. — There's an old joke that mosquitoes are like family: They are annoying, but they carry your blood. Mosquito season is starting to rev up across much of the United States — and that means bug bites.
When a mosquito bites you, it pierces the skin using a mouthpart called a proboscis to suck up blood. As it feeds, it injects saliva into your skin that can cause a reaction — a bump and itching. The pests also can spread parasites like malaria and viruses such as dengue, West Nile and Zika.
So you might want to pause summer vacation planning and consider what to look for in repellents, which keep bugs away from you, and insecticides, which kill them. Mosquitoes cling to the inside of a jar loaded with repellent during a test April 4 as part of a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory in Fort Collins, Colo. The U.
S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that for protection that lasts hours, people should look for ones with these active ingredients: DEET, IR3535, picaridin, or oil of lemon eucalyptus. Those ingredients are registered with the Environmental Protection Agency.
A note about oil of lemon eucalyptus: Lemon eucalyptus essential oil has a similar name, but the agency does not recommend it because it hasn't been tested for safety and is not registered with EPA as an insect repellent. Likewise, the CDC doesn't endorse other "natural" products that haven't been evaluated. Repellents are one line of defense again.