Do Mosquitoes Bother

You?

Remedies—Scientific and Otherwise

A CONSIDERABLE amount of interest has been raised by the publication, in an American magazine, of an alleged sure-fire mosquito repellent—to wit, the consumption of large quantities of Vitamin B pills.

An extract from this article was re printed in the March issue of the Fiji “Agricultural Journal,” and this has brought forth the following additional information about repelling mosquitoes from Mr. J. R. Terry, of the Department of Agriculture, British Columbia, Can ada: “ ... By accident, some years ago, I found a remedy in the old-fashioned spring medicine, ‘brimstone and treacle.’

Mosquitoes apparently do not like a sul phurous content in one’s body perspira tion. When away from home I have found the ordinary sulphur tablets, ob tainable at chemists, iust as effective.

Three tablets per day are sufficient.”

Another remedy, quoted by the “Agri cultural Gazette,” comes from “The Rotarian”: “A medical adviser assures us that by taking vitamin D (thiamin chloride) a person is not only made tolerant to the bite of mosquitoes, but a situation is set up in the blood which is highly distasteful to the mosquitoes themselves. Persons taking thiamin chloride have noticed that their ner spiration has a peculiar odour and that whenever a mosquito alights on the skin it departs in haste. Putting the thiamin on the skin seems to have no effect; it must be taken internally.”

The original article, which recom mended Vitamin B, stresses the fact that

large doses must be taken; and in this case, too, it was remarked that a “strange body odour” resulted. The taking of Vitamin B. or D or A or Z seems to be a direct challenge to the manufacturers of “BO” soap and other deodorants, who have spent the last 20 years making the public conscious of the things that even their best friends won’t tell them—and the cure may therefore prove worse than the disease.

APART from its use as a mosquito re pellent, Vitamin B (either 1 or 2) has become a fashionable fad in some countries —notably New Zealand.

Visitors to New Zealand, who have only been dimly aware of that particular vita min before, are not left long in ignor ance. Every chemist shop (and there are thousands in that Social-Security happy Dominion) is crammed to its doors with bottles of Vitamin B pills, and everyone is begged by hoarding, shop window placard, movie screen and news paper to swallow them ad lib, for almost everything that ails one, but particu larly for that state blessed of patent medicine manufacturers—nerves and all their associated works.

As a further inducement to become pill addicts, residents of New Zealand are informed that Vitamin B comes within the orbit of Social Security benefits— unlike most patent medicines.

There probably is quite a lot of virtue in Vitamin B, but why it should be neces sary for Dominion citizens, whose land is one of milk and honey and untold delights in beautiful food, to be flum moxed into swallowing it by the cartload, is one of the minor mysteries of the age.

A leading chieftain of Rarotonga.

Ngoroio Makea Ariki, died on January 22.