THE ROLE OF BODY ODORS IN THE RELATIVE ATTRACTIVENESS OF DIFFERENT MEN TO MALARIAL VECTORS IN BURKINA-FASO

People seem differentially attractive to mosquitoes. If this is so, ke y odours may exist to be exploited for sampling mosquitoes without put ting men at risk in human-biting catches (HBC). To investigate this po ssibility, HBC and catches based on entry traps baited with the odours from the men used as bait in the HBC (OBET) were performed in paralle l. In the HBC, the 'most attractive' catcher, in each of three teams o f four men, collected around twice as many mosquitoes as the 'least at tractive'. This differential across each team, which remained unchange d for 10 weeks, was not due to differences in catching skill because t he ranking varied between the mosquito species caught. Although, when the men's odours were tested with OBET, significant ranking was still observed for catches of Anopheles gambiae s.l., this ranking was lost if the men's CO2 outputs were artificially standardized. The search fo r a synthetic attractant is still worthwhile, however, because: (1) th ere appears to be real differences between the catchers embedded in th e statistical noise (there was a residual, unexplained 11% of the devi ance due to the factor 'man' alone); and (2) men certainly are attract ive. Meanwhile, CO2 is indicated as a surrogate bait for malarial vect ors.