Durable, practical, effective and affordable formats for insecticide-treated eave baffles that protect households and suppress malaria transmission

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Eave baffles (EBs) are a simple housing modification using widely-available netting materials, which can be treated with existing insecticide formulations. Treated EBs and window screens trap mosquitoes inside houses after they enter, and force them into lethal contact with insecticides when they attempt to exit again. Experimental prototypes of insecticide-treated EBs proved an equivalent or superior alternative to indoor residual spraying for killing malaria vectors in standardized experimental huts in southern Tanzania. EBs required >5 times less insecticide than IRS, and co-treating with a binding agent (BA) could enhance durability so that they only need to be treated every 2 to 3 years.The overall goal of this early-phase study is therefore to develop new, practical, scalable prototypes for EBs, which have been adapted to trap house-entering mosquitoes before they can attack the occupants, and can be readily installed in most rural African houses. We propose the following objectives for this early-phase study:1. Re-assess the insecticidal efficacy of the previously evaluated experimental prototype EBs against An. funestus and An. arabiensis in experimental huts at 12, 18, 24 and 30 months post-treatment, to demonstrate long-term efficacy when co-treated with BA.2. Develop a new EB trap design in a readily-manufactured "on a roll" format, together with broadly-scalable installation procedures, and demonstrate successful installation that reduces mosquito biting nuisance by >80% and assess user perceptions, in a random sample of rural Tanzanian houses.3. Demonstrate equivalent insecticidal efficacy of the scalable EB trap-on-a-roll format to the previous experimental prototype, using experimental huts to measure impact on mosquito survival.