Can anything be done to ward off mosquitoes? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Keeping mosquitoes away may be more important than ever as malaria returns to the continental US and other viral illnesses are also transmitted by them. Johns Hopkins mosquito expert Christopher Potter says most means to drive them off depend on chemicals.

Potter: These different chemicals that we're using to keep mosquitoes away from us how are they actually doing that? There's three main ways it does it. The first is it can be an odor that the mosquito doesn't like keeps them away from us because they just hate that smell. Another way is it's a contact repellent. They don't care about the smell of it but as soon as they touch it, because remember there's neurons in the mosquito legs, they hate it. They taste horrible or maybe it burns. And the other thing that it could do is called masking. They can contract chemicals onto your skin so your body odor is not being volatilized to get out there and so the mosquito has a harder time finding you because you're kind of invisible to them.     :35

Potter notes that finding a product that works for you is highly individualized and you may need more than one. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.