Shining light at night quells mosquito bites

Exposing malaria-transmitting mosquitoes to light at two-hour intervals during the night or at late daytime could inhibit their biting behaviour and reduce malaria transmission.

Anopheles gambiae mosquito. Image credit: James D. Gathany/Wikipedia (PD)

The team behind the research, from the University of Notre Dame in the United States, note that the development of resistance to insecticides requires innovative approaches for controlling the malaria vector.

Therefore, they explored the potential of using light to control mosquitoes’ feeding behaviour by exposing Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes — a key vector of malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa — to multiple pulses of bright light, especially in the night, when they are most likely to feed on human blood.

“When we subjected the mosquitoes to a series of pulses of light with a two-hour interval and presented throughout the entire night, we observed suppression of biting activity during most of the night,” says Giles Duffield, a co-author of the study.

Giles, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, tells that the finding was most prominent during the early to middle of the night and at dawn, when people are least protected by the barrier of a bed net.

Conversely, biting levels were significantly elevated when mosquitoes were exposed to a dark treatment during the late day, suggesting that light suppresses biting behaviour even during the late daytime.

But most Africans live in rural areas with no electricity. This means a lighting system would have to be set up using batteries or a generator, making the practical implementation of the method a big challenge.

To get protection throughout the night, the light would need to be switched on every two hours, which would disrupt human sleeping patterns as well as mosquito biting behaviour. (SciDev.Net)

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