THE widespread use in recent years of nets, insecticides and new drugs has helped to bring malaria under a measure of control—but evolution is constantly pushing back by generating resistant strains of both the parasite that causes the disease and the mosquito that spreads it. Even resistant mosquitoes, however, can take only so much chemical abuse, and Marit Farenhorst, a researcher at In2Care, a Dutch mosquito-control firm, and her colleagues think they have devised a way to dish out more of it.
Their method, as they report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a version of the party trick of making a balloon stick to a wall by imbuing it with static electricity. Substituting mosquito nets and insecticide particles for walls and balloons, Dr Farenhorst believes, yields a way of delivering more, and more diverse, insecticides, and really making them stick where they are needed—on the cuticle of the target insect.
Current mosquito nets are woven from fibres impregnated throughout with an insecticide. This permits them to be washed and used...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1KtFEZY
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