A nifty piece of chemistry may have found a safe, effective, long-lasting protection
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskFrancesca Dani of the University of Florence, in Italy, thinks she might have the answer. As she and her colleagues describe in the, they looked at a range of chemicals called aldehydes and ketones, and, with a bit of tweaking, produced something that seems a good, long-lasting, safeDr Dani knew from the scientific literature that some aldehydes and ketones have insect-repelling properties.
She and her colleagues therefore made a score of hydroxylated cyclic acetals and tested their mosquito-repelling qualities against those ofand Icaridin. The standard way to do this is to spray some onto the back of a volunteer’s hand and have him or her then put both hands into a mosquito cage. The unsprayed hand acts as a control, and it is thereby possible to decide, by comparing the number of insects landing on each, how effective a repellent a particular chemical is.
To the researchers’ delight, two of their hydroxylated cyclic acetals performed as well as Icaridin. And when they tested them on cell cultures they found that one, called 12a in the paper for simplicity’s sake, killed none of the cells exposed to it.was developed in the 1940s, to help safeguard American soldiers from mosquito-borne diseases when on campaign. Icaridin, with its longer period of protection, arrived in the 2000s.
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