Catnip lotion as effective as Deet at repelling mosquitoes, study finds

A health worker in northern Uganda taking a blood sample from a baby as part of a malaria vaccination programme last year. Photograph: Hajarah Nalwadda/Getty Images View image in fullscreen A health worker in northern Uganda taking a blood sample from a baby as part of a malaria vaccination programme last year. Photograph: Hajarah Nalwadda/Getty Images Catnip lotion as effective as Deet at repelling mosquitoes, study finds Researchers testing a cheap, homegrown oil in Uganda found what cats knew all along – it worked as well as the artificial chemical used globally A homegrown catnip lotion has proven “just as effective as Deet” as a mosquito repellant in trials carried out in Uganda . Catnip, or Nepeta cataria , is a common herb from the mint family. The chemical in the plant that causes feline euphoria – nepetalactone – also has insect-repelling properties but this has not previously been commercialised. New tools are vital in the fight against malaria, the disease spread by mosquitoes that infects about 282 million people a year and killed 610,000 in 2024 – the majority of them young children in African countries. There are concerns about rising resistance to insecticides , as well as the frontline drugs used to treat the disease. In a study presented at the Society for Experimental Biology conference in Florence on Tuesday, a team working between Uganda and Wales found mosquitoes seeking a blood meal were less likely to land on people wearing lotions made from catnip. Dr Simon Scofield, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University, said: “We found that a 6% catnip oil was just as effective as Deet, and the 2% catnip oil was only marginally less effective than that. “Deet is out of the price bracket for most rural Ugandan subsistence farmers, so buying commercially available mosquito repellents is just not practicable. “We wanted to make a repellent, which is highly efficacious, but also allows local people to be involved in the production cycle so that it costs a minimal amount of money,” he said. View image in fullscreen Catnip in bloom. Photograph: Alamy Whether or not local cats were more likely to follow lotion wearers was not part of the research, Scofield admitted. “We did not conduct any experiments to see if it is attractive to cats, but given that the active ingredient [nepetalactone] has well-known cat-attractive properties, I would expect they would quite like it,” he said. In the first part of the evaluation , laboratory tests confirmed that catnip oil could be an effective insect repellent. Researchers then successfully tested the catnip repellent in the field in eastern Uganda by checking how many mosquitoes landed on volunteers’ legs over an evening. Some volunteers used Deet (the world’s most widely used and effective insect repellent), some used a lotion with 2% concentration of catnip, others a 6% catnip lotion, while others used placebo creams. The research also established that the lotion could be made locally by a community en