Imparting Mosquito Repellent Agents & Assessing Mosquito Repellency on Textile
ed the textile with the synthetic repel-
lent formulations, however this prod-
uct are normally applied directly onto
the skin, constant contact of the syn-
thetic repellent which are high doses
and toxic resulted in skin problem such
as dermatitis. The other way using the
DEET on textiles is the addition of the
chemical during the rinse cycle of laun-
dering as stated in a previous research
study by Van Winkle (Van Winkle 2004).
The application of the DEET is done
by imparting the chemical repellents
with fabric softener at the stage of rinse
cycle in automatic washing machine
to fabric for providing soft treated gar-
ment that repel mosquitoes. The other
way is providing mosquito repellent to
yarn and fibre dur- ing the manufactur-
ing of the mosquito repellent garment.
The yarn and fibre are coated during
the finishing process using the Per-
methrin at the stage of dipping process.
The fabric is claimed to have a Per-
methrin compounds even after 25 laun-
derings (Pennetier et al. 2010). But, the
same major problems arise regarding
the use of synthetic repellents which
is harmful and toxic to human espe-
cially to children (Appel et al. 2008).
Present inventions of mosquito repel-
lent using the natural essential oil im-
parted on textile substrate are using
various medicinal herbs that claimed
to repel mosquito. The essential oils
are citronella oils to repel mosquito, cin-
namon oil to kill mosquito larvae, in-
cluding Geranium oil to prevent mos-quito (Patel et al. 2012). Four studies
(Anitha et al. 2011; Maheshwari and
Ramya 2014; Sumithra and Vasugi
Raja 2012; Vigneshkumar and Vijayku-
mar Vediappan 2012) used the plant
sources as a natural repellent to be
imparted into the textile material. The
plant essential oils were microencap-
sulated to prevent the easily evapora-
tion process before the impart to fab-
ric by pad dry cure method or addition
to rinse cycle. Study by Specos stat-
ed that textile treated with microencap-
sulated citronella performed the high-
er and and longer lasting protection
against mosquitoes compared to
sprayed fabric with ethanol solution of
essential oil (Specos et al. 2010).
Study by Geethadevi reported that fab-
ric treated with natural repellent using
exhausted method from combination
of essential oil such as thyme oil, cy-
press oil and grapefruit oil applied on
bamboo/tencell fabric with 50/50 pre-
sented the longer eficacy of mosquito
repellent up to 30 washes with no al-
lergic reaction to wearer. (Geethadevi
and Maheshwari 2015) oil the table
below shows the summarized of the
this review.
Methods of mosquito
repellency assessment
There are several methods to evalu-
ate the treated textile with mosquito
repellent. The most used techniques
are cage test, cone test, and excito
chamber. This paper only fur- ther dis-
NCM-OCTOBER 2021
40cussed the most three used mosquito
repellent assessments.
Cage test
The cage test might assess the viabil-
ity (Fig. 1) of repelling substance
against mosquitoes for lotions, cream
including impregnated material done
fast and effective approach.
It is designed to observe the mosquito
landing on the untreated and treated
fabric in the cage. The advantages of
this method is it provided the real situ-
ation of the prob- ing and biting of the
mosquito to the human besides it can
directly provide the obser- vation of the
mosquitoes behaviour towards the
treated materials. The drawbacks of
cage test involve the human partici-
pation, it takes a lot of preparation ei-
ther in term of paper works such as
needed to apply ethical approval, the
human and mosquito preparation. In
term of human participation, the con-
sent form and incentives must be pre-
pared as an appreciation to the volun-
teer. The mosquitoes used in the test
need to be free from pathogen as the
human subject involved in the test
must have the assurance that the test
will not harm them. The cage measure-
ment is according to WHO guideline
for efficacy testing of mosquito repel-
lents for human skin (WHO 1996) the
range of 35–40 cm per side. Some
studies reported in modification of the
cage dimension; Bano et al. used a
cage 18 × 18 × 18 cm dimension(Bano