RESEARCH ARTICLE


Insecticidal Bednets for the Fight Against Malaria – Present Time and Near Future



Ole Skovmand*
118 Chemin des Alouettes, 34170 Castelnau le Lez, France.

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2010
Volume: 3
First Page: 92
Last Page: 96
Publisher Id: TOBIOJ-3-92
DOI: 10.2174/18741967010030100092

Article History:

Received Date: 13/12/2009
Revision Received Date: 26/02/2010
Acceptance Date: 01/03/2010
Electronic publication date: 08/9/2010
Collection year: 2010

© 2010 Ole Skovmand.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the 118 Chemin des Alouettes, 34170 Castelnau le Lez, France; Tel: +33 467 757858; Mobile: +33 661 983086; E-mail: Ole.Skovmand@insectcontrol.net


Abstract

Malaria is to-day a tropical disease that especially has major impact in Subsahelian Africa. The current largescale campaign against malaria focuses on better first line use of medication and prevention: (1) the combined use of an Artimisin derivative and one of several synthetic anti-malarials; and (2) the use of insecticidal bednets for transmission prevention, since the disease is transmitted between humans by female mosquitoes. The change from nets that were to be treated and often re-treated to factory pre-treated nets about 7 years ago, made the change from a promising research tool to a major campaign tool. However, once the first line problem of fast disappearance of insecticide treatment was solved, other problems appeared such as physical net durability and low use rate of bednets among people that do not see only the advantages of the nets, but also experience the inconvenience of their use in the daily life. Finally, resistance to insecticides is appearing, probably originating from agricultural use of the same insecticides, but now amplified by the extensive use of insecticides for malaria control. A call for use of common sense and diversified use of insecticides is concluded.

Keywords: Malaria, bednets, insecticides, mosquitoes, developing countries.