Picture this: you’ve woken up during your first night on holiday somewhere hot. While you were sleeping you had started to itch at a small, hot mark on your shoulder. As you wake yourself up with your scratching, the mark blooms and swells to quadruple the size, resembling a continent. Before long it’s taking everything in your power to not rip your own arm off to relieve the constant, throbbing itch. You eventually fall asleep again but when you wake in the morning and putter into the kitchen you can still sense this angry, swollen beast on your shoulder. Another has popped up, under your elbow and, weirdly, on your forehead. But by the coffee machine, looking well-rested, is your friend who shared your room. As you lament the onslaught from mosquitoes, your friend looks at you, shrugs, and says: “I don’t really get bitten – you must just be delicious to them.”
Mosquito bites can be a major irritation – and in certain regions of the world, raises the risk of tropical diseases such as Zika virus and malaria. If you are such a person who has been dealing with these massively itchy, verging on painful annoyances on your summer holidays – or indeed at home in the UK – you’ve probably asked yourself more than once: “Why me?!”
