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. 2016 Aug 9;113(32):8900-2.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1609889113. Epub 2016 Aug 1.

The threat (or not) of insecticide resistance for malaria control

Matthew B Thomas  1 , Andrew F Read  2
Affiliations

The threat (or not) of insecticide resistance for malaria control

Matthew B Thomas et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
The possible impact of insecticide resistance on the efficacy of LLINs. As bed net coverage (proportion of the population using nets) increases, more people gain personal protection from malaria (solid blue line). Mosquitoes seeking those people are killed by insecticides on the nets, and so even people not sleeping under nets experience less exposure to mosquito bites, giving the combined population-wide protective effect of LLINs against a susceptible mosquito population shown in red. If insecticide resistance renders the insecticide completely ineffective, the community benefit is lost and LLINs provide physical protection only (an important assumption here is that the nets are intact and are used effectively). Thus, the difference between the red and blue lines represents the “potential effect size” of resistance. At intermediate levels of coverage we expect the largest effect size, as this is where the mass action effect of the insecticide provides the greatest relative contribution to control (indicated by arrow A). However, indirect impacts of insecticide exposure, such as delayed mortality, reductions in feeding, or pleiotropic effects of resistance, such as increased refractoriness to malaria parasites, could still contribute to reductions in transmission (dashed blue line). Such effects could result in a reduced “realized effect size” of resistance (arrow B).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment on

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References

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