The Effect of Acidic Lemon, Ginger, Peppermint, and Vinegar Extracts on the Relative Rate of Repellency of Culex pipiens

Mosquito populations are increasing, allowing malaria and other diseases to affect more people around the world. Since these diseases are becoming a major epidemic, research has been conducted to find an effective repellent. The problem then is whether people can afford the high-end repellents researchers have created. This research, therefore, focuses on finding an affordable-yet-effective repellent to steer away mosquitoes. Cheaper, pharmaceutical extracts with a lower pH have been found to work in repelling mosquitoes (Giatropoulos et al., 2018). In this experiment, lemon, peppermint, ginger, and vinegar extracts were used and it was hypothesized that the lemon extract would be most effective in repelling mosquitoes since it had the lowest pH (pH of 2.3). This experiment placed 10 mosquitoes in a mosquito chamber and used lemon, peppermint, ginger, and vinegar to find each respective rate of repellency. There was a total of 25 trials with 5 test for each independent variable and the controlled group, test with no extracts. The lemon extract was concluded to have the highest rate of repellency at 96% and ginger extract had the lowest at 74%. An ANOVA test was performed for each repellent; F(4,20)=115.18, p<0.001 (lower than the alpha-value 0.05) to compare the controlled group with the lemon, peppermint, ginger, and vinegar extracts. A post-hoc Tukey test was also conducted to find the significant differences between each extract, which rejected the null hypothesis. Between the four repellents, the lemon extract had the highest rate of repellency.