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New mesh gives net gains against mosquitoes

Get a good night's sleep: bed nets designed to stop mosquitoes in their tracks are undergoing large-scale trials in India and Tanzania. The German firm BASF has developed a polymer mesh whose cross-linked structure can retain a pyrethroid insecticide inside it for 25 washes, yet still allows enough of the chemical to diffuse to the surface to "knock down" nearly all the mosquitoes that land on it.