African mosquitoes are fast developing resistance to common insecticides – placing progress against malaria in jeopardy, researchers warned today.
Pest control chemicals play a vital role in making bed-nets effective.
Distributing these freely to families – along with access to new treatments – is credited with cutting rates of the killer disease.
The latest research in Senegal found a species of mosquito is developing growing resistance to several insecticides.
Alongside this, adults and teenagers proved more susceptible to infection – possibly because of having been successfully protected from it in childhood.
The study, in the village of Dielmo, tested the impact of bed-nets treated with the chemical deltamethrin. The research showed the project worked for two years – but after then there was resurgence of malaria to greater levels than before.
The researchers found that 37 per cent of mosquitoes of the Anopheles gambiae species were resistant to deltamethrin by 2010 and nearly half were resistant to another chemical pythethroid.
The findings are reported today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Dr Jean-François Trape, of the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, Dakar, Senegal, writes: "These findings are of great concern, since they support the idea that insecticide resistance might not permit a substantial decrease in malaria morbidity in many parts of Africa where A gambiae is the major vector and acquired clinical immunity is a key epidemiological factor."
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