Experimental huts have long been used to evaluate the performance of nets under semi-field conditions.
Volunteers sleep under holed nets in huts which have entry points to allow mosquitoes, attracted by the host odor, to enter the hut. The next morning, all entry points are sealed and the number of mosquitoes alive and dead, and blood fed or non fed, are counted. In the ESSENTIALs project we are constructing experimental huts in each of our field sites and using these to assess how the new classes of nets perform against local mosquito populations. Mosquitoes collected from the experimental huts will be assessed using our full sub-lethal pipeline.
The locations of our current set of experimental huts can be found here