Better Net
In the UK and many temperate countries, mosquitoes are mostly just a seasonal annoyance. But in countries where malaria is prevalent, they can be deadly. The malaria parasite, transmitted by the insects’ bite, infects approximately 200 million people a year, killing roughly half a million. Bed nets like the ones pictured, typically treated with an insecticide, are an effective way of preventing bites, but, as the results of a recent trial show, such nets can be improved. A new type of net treated with a chemical cocktail – an insecticide and a hormone that limits mosquito reproduction – has been tested in Burkina Faso where, compared with traditional nets, the new ones led to a 12 percent reduction in the number of malaria cases in two years. That’s a sizeable drop – if the results were extrapolated to the country’s population, the new nets could prevent more than a million cases of malaria.
Written by Ruth Williams
Image by Steve Lindsay, Durham University, UK
Durham University, County Durham, UK
Image copyright held by the original authors
Research published in The Lancet, August 2018
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