Does it seem that mosquitos are just attracted to you? It turns out — they could be.

A study in the journal of medical entomology found that one type of mosquito landed on 83 percent of the patients with type o blood and just 47 percent of people with type a blood.

Scientists believe mosquitos may be able to sense the sugars some people secrete through their skin based on their blood type. It turns out, that’s not the only thing your blood type could make you more or less susceptible to.

Your blood type could impact your chance of getting cancer, having a stroke or catching Covid.

Human blood falls into four different blood groups: A, B, AB and O. Your blood also has what is known as an Rh factor: It either contains a certain protein or it doesn’t. The RH factor is what determines the positive [+] or negative [-] after your blood type. The possible combinations create eight different blood types: A+, A-, B+, B-, AB+, AB-, O+ and O-. Thirty-two percent of the population are A+, six percent are A-, 11 percent are B+, two percent are B-, four percent are AB+, one percent is AB-, 39 percent are O+, and seven percent are O-.

Blood type can be determined by a simple test. First, a phlebotomist — someone trained to draw blood — will use a needle to draw blood from your arm or hand.

The typical method for typing blood involves two steps, forward typing and reverse typing. In the first step — forward typing— your blood cells are mixed with antibodies against type A and B blood, and the sample is checked to see whether the blood cells stick together. If so, it means your blood cells reacted with one of the antibodies.

The second step is called “back typing” or “reverse typing.” The liquid part of your blood without red blood cells (serum) is mixed with blood cells that are known to be type A and type B. People with type A blood have antibodies against Type B blood (“anti-B antibodies”) in their serum, and those with type B blood have antibodies against Type A blood (“anti-A antibodies”) in their serum. Type O blood contains both anti-A and anti-B antibodies.

The need to determine blood-type can delay blood transfusions in emergency situations, and this in turn can prove fatal.

To speed up the process, a team of scientists from Tokyo University of Science, Japan, has developed a lab-on-a-chip device that can tell blood type within five minutes.

The chip contains a micro-sized "laboratory" with various compartments through which the blood sample travels in sequence and is processed until results are obtained.

To start the process, a user simply inserts a small amount of blood, presses a button, and waits for the result. Inside the chip, the blood is first diluted with a saline solution and air bubbles are introduced to promote mixing. The diluted blood is transported to a homogenizer where further mixing, driven by more intensely moving bubbles, yields a uniform solution.

Portions of the homogenized blood solution are introduced into four different detector chambers. Two chambers each contain reagents that can detect either A antigens or B antigens. A third chamber contains reagents that detect D antigens, and a fourth chamber contains only saline solution, with no reagent, and serves as a negative control chamber in which the user should not observe any results.

Antigen-antibody reaction will cause blood to coagulate, and by looking at which chambers have coagulated blood, the user can tell the blood type and whether the blood is positive or negative.

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