She Gets Up to 500 Mosquito Bites in a Day, and It's Part of the Job

Hundreds of mosquito bites in a single day sounds like a nightmare to most people. For Dr. Véronique Paris, a medical entomologist, it’s a normal part of the research.

Imagine being bitten by hundreds of mosquitoes in a single day, and getting paid for it. This is the reality of Dr. Véronique Paris, whose job as a medical entomologist at the University of Melbourne Australia entails hundreds of mosquito bites.

Paris studies how mosquitoes pick up and spread disease-causing pathogens and part of that is having mosquitoes feed on her, often resulting in 250 to 500 bites in a single day. According to Paris, this is the most practical and time-effective way to provide “blood meals” to the mosquitoes so they can produce eggs.

About once a week, for three weeks, Paris offers her arm to a cage of about 250 mosquitoes for about 15 to 20 minutes, and once the insects look engorged, her job feeding them is done. If more mosquitoes are needed for her study, she can go up to four feeding times a week using three to four cages.

The mosquitoes are raised in the lab, and they do not have the diseases Paris is studying. Scientists are not obligated to have the insects feed on them. This is purely voluntary, and as a safety precaution, they’re only supposed to work with their own colonies. For colonies that are not considered safe, they are fed through a membrane system without human intervention.

Naturally, the mosquito bites leave marks which, according to Paris, fade within a day, taking about an hour to turn to red dots and about four hours to completely disappear.

Paris’s studies focus on several diseases including Buruli ulcer, a slow-developing bacterial infection that can destroy skin, fat, and small blood vessels, spread by a local Australian mosquito species. She is also studying the Ross River virus, Barmah Forest virus, and Japanese encephalitis.

Paris clarifies that she isn’t working on the viruses themselves. "I'm just working on how they hitchhike mosquitoes, if that makes sense," she says. She explains the logic behind what she’s doing: “We are just interested in how we can stop people getting sick from a mosquito bite, while I’m kind of like this step before that’s actually happening.”

Part of her work also includes testing conditions mosquitoes can tolerate like different temperatures and water quality. It is, she says, about "the nitty-gritty of what the mosquitoes like or dislike."

Paris raises awareness about her job by sharing videos of her work online, which have gone viral. According to her, her viewers' curiosity prompted her to explain the research in more detail.

She also received criticism, questioning why money is spent on the work. Paris says it’s a reflection of "a distrust in science on the whole." Her advice is simple: "I would just always encourage people to follow some science communicators on social media.”