Kate Hodal - Scientists hail malaria breakthrough as bed nets prove deadly to mosquitoes
A bed net designed to
kill insecticide-resistant mosquitoes could prevent millions of cases of
malaria across sub-Saharan Africa, scientists have
found. A two-year clinical
trial in Burkina
Faso showed that dousing bed nets with a combination of chemicals
resulted in a 12% reduction in clinical malaria cases, compared with
conventional bed nets.
The findings, published
this week in the Lancet, demonstrate a “big step forward” in the fight
against malaria in Africa, which is home to 91% of
all malarial deaths worldwide, said Professor Steve Lindsay of the
department of biosciences at Durham University, who worked on the study. “This is simply a good
news story and one to give us hope for the future,” said Lindsay. “The 12%
reduction may look small, but it’s actually huge: if we had rolled the nets out
across the whole of Burkina Faso, then we would have reduced the number of
malaria attacks in children under five by 700,000, or by 1.2m for the whole
population.”
Existing bed nets
contain a single pyrethroid insecticide, to which blood-seeking malaria
mosquitoes (the female Anopheles) are increasingly resistant. During the study,
conventional bed nets in 91 villages in rural Burkina Faso were replaced with
combination nets containing a pyrethroid insecticide and insect growth
regulator, pyriproxyfen, which shortens the lives of mosquitoes and reduces
their ability to reproduce... read more:
