Deet

Malaria Journal
Methodology

BioMed Central

Open Access

Limitation of using synthetic human odours to test mosquito repellents
Fredros O Okumu*1,2,3, Emmanuel Titus1, Edgar Mbeyela1, Gerry F Killeen1,4,5 and Sarah J Moore1,3,5
Address: 1Biomedical and Environmental Sciences Thematic group, Ifakara Health Institute, PO Box 53 Ifakara, Tanzania, 2School of Biological Sciences, University of Nairobi, PO Box 30197 Nairobi, Kenya, 3Disease Control and Vector Biology Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street WC1E 7HT, London, UK, 4Vector group, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Pembroke Place, Liverpool L3 5QA, UK and 5School of Biological Sciences, Durham University, South Road, DH1 3LE, Durham, UK Email: Fredros O Okumu* - [e-mail]; Emmanuel Titus - [e-mail]; Edgar Mbeyela - [e-mail]; Gerry F Killeen - [e-mail]; Sarah J Moore - [e-mail] * Corresponding author

Published: 7 July 2009 Malaria Journal 2009, 8:150 doi:10.1186/1475-2875-8-150

Received: 5 May 2009 Accepted: 7 July 2009

This article is available from: http://www.malariajournal.com/content/8/1/150 © 2009 Okumu et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract
Background: Gold-standard tests of mosquito repellents involve exposing human volunteers to host-seeking mosquitoes, to assess the protective efficacy of the repellents. These techniques are not exposure-free and cannot be performed prior to toxicological evaluation. It is postulated that synthetic lures could provide a useful assay that mimics in-vivo conditions for use in high-throughput screening for mosquito repellents. Methods: This paper reports on a semi-field evaluation of

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