[Brief History of Insecticide-Treated Bed Nets in the Fight against Malaria: A Testimony on the Crucial 1980’s Decade]

In thirty years, bed nets treated with pyrethroids have been established as a means of prevention against malaria for personal protection and in public health. One of the actors of these discoveries gives an overview of insecticidetreated bed nets (ITNs) and brings his testimony, more particularly on the circumstances and frames of mind which prevailed in the 1980’s, a crucial decade for these breakthroughs which served humanity. In 1983, the first experiment testing the effect of bed nets treated with pyrethroid insecticide was performed and revealed the impact of this method on the reduction of Plasmodium transmission. This discovery was made in an experimental field station in Burkina Faso showing that each of the many entomological parameters measured led to a clear decrease in mosquito-human contact. A few years later, still in Burkina Faso, it was shown that ITNs, massively used in a village, reduced the longevity and vector capacity of mosquito populations, to such an extent that ITNs acted as a means of vector control. These researches were all led within the Centre Muraz of the Organization of Coordination and Cooperation for the Control of Great Endemies (OCCGE) by researchers belonging to the Office of Overseas Scientific and Technical Research (ORSTOM, which later became French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development), and benefited from the scientific and financial support of the Division of Vector Biology and Control from the World Health Organization (WHO).