Researchers caution that people shouldn’t use the same microwave for heating food and insecticides.
Microwaving the insecticide deltamethrin rearranges its crystal structure but doesn’t change its chemical composition. The rearrangementThe researchers didn’t set out to revive insecticides, says Bart Kahr, a crystallographer at New York University. He and colleagues had been working on crystal growth experiments. “And it turns out that a very good crystal for the experiment that we wanted to do was DDT, the very old, notorious insecticide from the last century.
They then started experimenting with deltamethrin, an insecticide that is commonly used against mosquitoes that can carry malaria. The chemical is often incorporated into bed nets or sprayed on walls or other surfaces in homes. Mosquitoes absorb the insecticide when they come in contact with it. Kahr and colleagues previously discovered that heating deltamethrinAltering the arrangement of crystals is a tried-and-true way of giving drugs new and different properties, Kahr says.
Kahr’s team heated a chalk formulation of deltamethrin called D-Fense Dust either in an oven or in a microwave. In the oven, the researchers could precisely control the temperature, he says.
Popping deltamethrin in the microwave for a few minutes rearranges the insecticide’s typical crystal structure . Tests of heated deltamethrin crystals showed that they are effective against mosquitoes resistant to the insecticide’s usual form.Previously, the researchers had tested the heated deltamethrin crystals on mosquitoes that were already sensitive to the insecticide.
That’s important because insecticide resistance is a growing problem and is impairing the ability to control mosquito populations to tamp down malaria spread, says Janet Hemingway, a geneticist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England who was not involved in the new study. “We’re now at the point where almost nowhere in Africa is fully susceptible.”
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