Staff at AIF and researchers at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have developed a technique that measures how much insecticide is found on the surface of mosquito nets.
The team used a technique called time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) to analyze samples of the permethrin-embedded netting. AIF and CDC identified a level that permethrin (one of the most widely-used insecticides used in netting) becomes ineffective. Before this technique, there was no effective way to measure how much insecticide was on the netting. This can help determine how long the netting is actually effective.
Their paper, “Imaging and Quantitative Analysis of Insecticide in Mosquito Net Fibers Using Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS),” was published in PLOS ONE in 2018. Elaine Zhou and Fred Stevie were the lead researchers from AIF and can be contacted directly from their respective pages.