Catnip flowers – credit, Gordon Robertson CC 3.0. via Wikimedia
Homegrown catnip plants have proven to be as effective as DEET for repelling mosquitoes in rural Uganda.
Presented at an international science conference in Florence, Italy, a collaborative team of Welsh and Ugandan researchers believe they’ve found a lower cost solution to mosquito control that can reduce reliance on malaria medication, which the parasite is beginning to develop resistance to.
Nepetalactone is a chemical found in the essential oil of catnip, Nepeta cataria. It’s known for causing euphoric feelings in cats, but also seems to interfere with the olfactory sense of various mosquito species.
In laboratory tests, a 6% nepetalactone skin lotion proved as good as DEET for repelling mosquitoes from landing on a human arm. 2% nepetalactone proved only slightly less effective.
“DEET is out of the price bracket for most rural Ugandan subsistence farmers, so buying commercially available mosquito repellents is just not practicable,” says Dr. Simon Scofield, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University. “We wanted to make a repellent that is highly efficacious, but also allows local people to be involved in the production cycle so that it costs a minimal amount of money.”
Nepeta cataria is easy to grow, and the essential oil is easy to distil. It smells better than DEET, and besides all this it’s been used as a mosquito repellent traditionally for centuries.
“There is a real need to reduce the reliance on malaria medicines because malaria can develop resistance to drugs,” Scofield said. “Mosquito repellents represent one of the primary measures used to reduce the risk of malaria by reducing mosquito landing and biting events.”
Scofield worked with locals to develop a lotion product that could eventually be sold in order to apply market forces to what previously was created only through grant money. Even still, the resulting DSK lotion product cannot be patented, because it’s just essential oil and various stabilizers and other cosmetic bases.
“Once we know that we can sell and distribute the repellent at a low cost, that should generate a self-sustaining system where the money is flowing back to everybody at each stage in the development,” says Scofield.
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