Testing Methods for Mosquito-Repellent Treated Textiles

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Table 16.1: Classification of the effect of anti-mosquito textiles and points of evaluation.

Category

Classification

Effect against mosquitos

Evaluation

E-1

Blood feeding repel-

lency Physical block-

ing

Blocking of mosquito bit-

ing or blood-sucking

Number

of

biting

mosquitos or number

of bites

E-2

Contact

repellency

Spatial repellency

Inhibition of orientation or

landing to host

Number of repelled or

attracted mosquitos

E-3

Excito-repellency

Inhibition of probing

Number of repelled or

staying mosquitos

E-4

Knockdown

Inhibition

of

flight

or

movement

Number of knocked-

down mosquitos

E-5

Killing

Death

Number

of

dead

mosquitos

have to be involved in the test methods for textiles (Table 16.1). The most used test

methods for repellent-treated textiles are cage, cone, and excito chamber tests (Anuar

and Yusof, 2016). As Anuar and Yusof (2016) reported, test methods using mosquito

attractants (Table 16.2) might imitate the more realistic situation of mosquito biting.

Table 16.3 shows officially published test methods for anti-mosquito textiles.

2. The cage test: The cage test might be most common and simple test method for

evaluation of repellents and repellent-treated materials, although it needs ethical ap-

proval by volunteers and requires the assurance of pathogen free mosquitos. It also

needs enough replications to reduce data discrepancies caused by individual varia-

tions among volunteers (i.e., participant sex, age, etc.). A screened cage (40 cm³)

containing 200, 7 - 8 day old starved female mosquitos are used for each replicate of

the evaluation. Participants will wear a long-sleeved rubber glove on one hand/arm

that has a window cut out (6cm L x 5cm W) on the front sleeve of the glove. Next,

a piece (7cm L x 6cm W) of treated textile is used to cover the window on the glove

sleeve. The participant then exposes the treated arm into the screened cage with

mosquitos for 5 minutes. This exposure is repeated at 1 hr intervals until mosquitos

land/probe on the treated textiles on the window (Figure 16.1). Alternatively, wear-

ing a short sleeved glove to protect the hand, a large piece of repellent treated textile

can be used to wrap and cover all part of the forearm and exposed the treated forearm

(Figure 16.2) to the testing cage for 5 minutes. Again, repeated at 1 hr intervals until

the landing, probing and biting presents.

3. The cone and excito-repellency chamber test: These test methods are ethically more

ideal because they do not use human volunteers or animals subjects as mosquito