Development and evaluation of mosquito-electrocuting traps as alternatives to the human landing catch technique for sampling host-seeking malaria vectors
Published: 16 December 2015
Development of new surveillance and control tools and evaluation of a trapping method (The Electric Grid Trap, EGT) as a tool to monitor malarial vectors (mosquitoes), offering an exposure-free replacement to the Human Landing Catch (HLC) approach.
Development of new surveillance and control tools and evaluation of a trapping method (The Electric Grid Trap, EGT) as a tool to monitor malarial vectors (mosquitoes), offering an exposure-free replacement to the Human Landing Catch (HLC) approach.
To study the host-seeking behaviours of indoor and outdoor biting mosquitoes a traditional method made use of the HLC method, namely, a human is used as bait; this of course exposes the human to potentially malarial parasite infected mosquitoes. We have designed, developed and evaluated an alternative Electric Grid Trap system known as EGT, which still uses humans as a draw, but are caught by the EGT before landing on the human.
The EGT is connected to variable-power supply unit that has been customised to work with the specific requirements of our EGT. The unit can be set to a specific output voltage, as determined to be optimal for a particular mosquito species and/or ecological setting, but also has the capability of being altered either higher or lower to optimize performance in different settings.
This provides a more effected, yet exposure-free, means of monitoring mosquitoes host-seeking behaviour.
http://www.malariajournal.com/content/14/1/502
For more detail contact the Biolectronics Unit - Mr Nosrat Mirzai.
First published: 16 December 2015