Remote effect of Insecticide - treated nets and the personal 1 protection against malaria mosquito bites

10 Experimental huts are part of the WHO process for testing and evaluation of Insecticide Treated Nets 11 (ITN) in semi-field conditions. Experimental Hut Trials (EHTs) mostly focus on two main indicators (i.e. 12 mortality and blood feeding reduction) that serve as efficacy criteria to obtain WHO interim 13 recommendation. However, several other outputs that rely on counts of vectors collected in the huts 14 are neglected although they can give useful information about vectors’ behavior and personal 15 protection provided by ITNs. In particular, EHTs allow to measure the deterrent effect and personal 16 protection of ITNs. 17 To provide a better assessment of ITNs efficacy, we performed a retrospective analysis of the 18 deterrence and the personal protection against malaria transmission for 12 unwashed and 13 washed 19 ITNs evaluated through EHTs conducted in West Africa. 20 A significant deterrent effect was shown for six of the 12 unwashed ITNs tested. When washed 20 21 times, only three ITNs had significant deterrent effect (Rate Ratios (RR)<1; p<0.05) and three showed 22 an apparent “attractiveness” (RR>1; p<0.01). When compared to the untreated net, all unwashed ITNs 23 showed lower number of blood-fed Anopheles indicating a significant personal protection (RR<1, 24 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/073718 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Sep. 22, 2016;