Journal article
Testing bio-efficacy of insecticidetreated nets with fewer mosquitoes for enhanced malaria control
- Abstract:
- Malaria control programs implementing Long-Lasting Insecticidal Nets (LLINs) are encouraged to conduct field monitoring of nets’ survival, fabric integrity and insecticidal bio-efficacy. The reference method for testing the insecticide activity of LLINs needs 100 two-to-five-day-old female mosquitoes per net, which is highly resource-intensive. We aimed at identifying an alternative protocol, using fewer mosquitos, while ensuring a precision in the main indicator of ±5 percentage points (pp). We compared different laboratory methods against the probability of the LLIN to fail the test as determined by a hierarchical Bayesian model. When using 50 mosquitoes per LLIN and considering mortality only instead of mortality or knock-down as validity criteria, the average error in the measure of the proportion of nets considered as valid was 0.40 pp. The 95% confidence interval of this value never exceed 5 pp when the number of LLIN tested was ≥40. This method slightly outperforms the current recommendations. As a conclusion, testing the bio-efficacy of LLINs with half as many mosquitoes provides a valid evaluation of the proportion of valid LLINs. This approach could increase entomology labs’ testing capacity and decrease costs, with no impact in the decision process for public health purposes.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 2.1MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41598-018-34979-3
Authors
- Publisher:
- Nature Research
- Journal:
- Scientific Reports More from this journal
- Volume:
- 8
- Article number:
- 16769
- Publication date:
- 2018-11-13
- Acceptance date:
- 2018-10-07
- DOI:
- ISSN:
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2045-2322
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1127116
- Local pid:
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pubs:1127116
- Deposit date:
-
2020-08-18
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Boyer, S et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2018
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2018 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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