Academic/General Training Module by Adam Smith First Published in 2015

 IELTS
 JOURNAL 
 
177 
Health workers, discouraged by the diminishing effectiveness of malarial drugs, are 
seeking to promote physical barriers to infection rather than chemical ones. The 
concept of mosquito nets hung over beds to keep mosquitoes away is certainly not 
new, but recent efforts to improve them have led to some success in protecting people 
from malaria. In experiments in Gambia, the number of children dying from malaria 
has dropped 50% since using nets soaked in insecticide . To remain effective, the nets 
need to be re-soaked only twice a year, and no drugs need to be taken for prevention. 
The nets provide additional benefits to the families who use them in that they prevent 
other types of irritating insects from getting too close. 
Whether or not mosquito nets would be effective on a large scale remains to be seen, 
as conditions vary from place to place. Some users complain it is too hot under the 
nets to be able to sleep. Furthermore, their cast limits the number of people who can 
take advantage of them. 
Thus the search for a vaccine for malaria continues. Manuel Patarroyo, a medical 
researcher from Columbia, stated in 1993 that he had been successful in trying a new 
vaccine on some 20000 people in South America. Similar testing of the vaccine is being 
done in Africa, but health officials there are not convinced it will be effective because 
the rate at which new cases of malaria develops is many times higher than that in 
South America. 
Although not a vaccine, arthemeter, derived from the Chinese herb qinghao, appears 
to offer an effective way of protecting people from malaria parasites. It proved to have 
tripled the effectiveness of chloroquine in research carried out in 1993 along the 
border of Thailand and Cambodia, an area not unlike sub-Saharan Africa in the 
strength of the parasite's resistance to conventional malarial drugs. There are plans for 
the new drug to be produced in China and marketed internationally by a French 
pharmaceutical company. 
Questions 30-35 
Use the information in Reading Passage 3 to indicate the relationship between the two 
items given for each question below. Classify them as: