Report of the seventh WHOPES working group meeting WHO/HQ, Geneva 2–4 December 2003

Overview

The seventh meeting of the WHOPES Working Group, an advisory group to the WHO Pesticide Evaluation Scheme (WHOPES) was convened at WHO headquarters, Geneva, 2–4 December 2003. The objective of the meeting was to review the reports of the testing and evaluation of VectoBac® WG (Valent BioSciences, USA) for mosquito larviciding, PermaNet® (Vestergaard Frandsen, Denmark) for malaria prevention and control, and Gokilaht®-S 5EC (Sumitomo Chemical Co., Japan) for space spraying against mosquitoes.

The meeting was opened by Dr L. Savioli, Coordinator, Strategy Development and Monitoring for Parasitic Diseases and Vector Control. In his remarks, Dr Savioli emphasized the need for the development of novel vector control strategies, as the number of available tools is rather limited at the present time. He further noted that WHOPES is playing a critical role in the development of vector control agents and their formulations.

This document is a continuation of such effort and contains information on the global use of insecticides for vector-borne disease control for the period 2000-2002.