Chicken saves the day in the fight against malaria!!!
This morning the press was full of articles discussing a recently published research on the fight against malaria. The research detailed how researchers tested and verified that Chickens can affect mosquitoes and who they decide to attack.It seems the smell of the chicken is quite effective as a repellent.
HIGHLIGHT: Sleeping next to a CHICKEN will keep the blood-sucking insects at bay
***Poultry-Scented Insect Repellent May Be Key To Disease Control
- In test, fewer mosquitoes were counted in a room containing a live chicken
- Means sleeping next to a chicken may help protect people against malaria
Methodology
volunteers slept in beds surrounded by mosquito nets. Others had live chicken, or its feathers outside the bed. Others did not.
Results
They found the
mosquitoes steered clear of their room when a cage containing a live
chicken, or its feathers, was suspended outside their bed.
Background
Researchers embarked on a series of unique experiments while they were stationed in Western Ethiopia in 2012. After documenting the blood-feeding patterns of female Anopheles arabiensis mosquitoes, one of the dominant causes of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, they noticed that in 3 villages they studied but no matter what the environment, they nearly never bit chickens. Based on what they saw in the villages, they theorized that the bugs had an instinctive aversion to parfum de fowl.
To test that their theory, they collected hair, feather and wool samples from volunteer chickens, cows, sheep, people, and goats, and isolated the individual chemicals that made up their scent. Then they rigged a device to emit the synthetic version of these chemicals while a human subject laid asleep nearby protected by bed netting, and a suction trap captured any enticed mosquitoes. They also even let a live chicken stand guard near a volunteer in a fine mesh screen cage.
Nine houses were individually treated with one of nine synthetic chemicals, including the four chicken-specific chemicals they identified, while another had the chicken sentry and the last contained a device that emitted no chemicals, serving as a control. To better protect against any potential bias, they even switched the placement of these devices (and chicken) in every house each night for 11 nights.
By experiment’s end, they found that mosquitoes visited the houses laced with chicken-specific chemicals or which were being guarded by a chicken much less often than they did the control house. Three of the chemicals shared by chickens and other animals also had a repellent effect.
A few books in our collection on malaria
The repellents they identify seem to work over a rather long distance, which is in contrast to commercial mosquito repellents that only are active at close range.
Given that mosquitoes are steadily becoming more resistant to pesticides though — making malaria control all the more difficult — any extra help in mosquito deterrence would be of great help.
For more on this very interesting research see .....
https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12936-016-1386-3
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