SCIENCE sciencemag.org 4 SEPTEMBER 2020 • VOL 369 ISSUE 6508 1153PHOTO: © BAYER
The state government asserted in a state-
ment, however, that “the fiscal adjustment
will not paralyze research,” and that “sci-
ence has the full support” of the govern-
ment. The bill would only redirect “surplus
resources” to “remedy a current problem,
which is the need to pay civil servants, in-
cluding teachers from these institutions
themselves, with the sharp drop in revenue
caused by the pandemic. ... Certainly, it is
not fair for the poorest population to be
unassisted with medicines or health care,
while universities and FAPESP may have
surplus cash.”
University and foundation officials say
that far from being a luxury, the reserve
funds are vital for covering budget deficits
during lean years. Each of the institutions
receives a fixed share of state tax revenues,
but Brazil’s struggling economy has made
that income less reliable in recent years.
Unicamp, for example, has had to dip into
its reserves to cover operating expenses in
each of the past 6 years, Knobel says.
At FAPESP, loss of its reserve could
threaten funding already committed
to multiyear projects. The foundation
typically supports projects that last 2 to
11 years but does not release the total fund-
ing up front. Instead the money is paid
in installments. As a result, claims that
money in the foundation’s reserve fund “is
a surplus” are “not true,” says Mayana Zatz,
a USP geneticist. Much of that money “is
already committed.”
Zatz and others say FAPESP’s reserve
has also enabled it to respond rapidly to
requests for funding to study emerging is-
sues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and
the earlier Zika virus outbreak. And the
foundation has been a lifeline for research-
ers in São Paulo in recent years as the
federal government has reduced spending
on science, cutting research budgets by
roughly half since 2014.
Last week, the chancellors of the three
state universities met with members of the
government to discuss the proposal, but
they failed to win removal of the provision.
Now, researchers are hoping their public
campaign will persuade the assembly to re-
ject it. But they are uneasy. “Unfortunately,
most [lawmakers] have little understand-
ing of how science works, so it’s worrying,”
says Ohara Augusto, a chemist at USP and
the coordinator of a large FAPESP research
project. She fears passage of the bill could
end decades of progress on building sci-
entific excellence in Brazil. “Things were
going well. ... They weren’t perfect but
we had hope,” she says. “But now this bill
could bury our hope.”Ignacio Amigo is a journalist in Madrid.A
n insecticide about to be widely de-
ployed inside African homes to com-
bat malaria-carrying mosquitoes is
already losing its punch. Two years
ago, the World Health Organization
(WHO) gave the green light for clo-
thianidin, long used in agriculture to kill crop
pests, to be added to the current mainstays
of indoor mosquito control, which are losing
their effectiveness as the insects develop re-
sistance. Since then, many African countries
have been laying plans to spray walls with the
pesticide, which represents the first new class
of chemicals adopted for such home use in
decades. They’ve also been looking anxiously
for pre-existing resistance.
Now, scientists at Cameroon’s Centre for
Research in Infectious Diseases have found
it. They recently sampled mosquito species,
including two key malaria carriers, from
rural and urban areas around Yaoundé, the
capital. In one standard assay, exposure
to clothianidin for 1 hour killed 100% of
Anopheles coluzzii. But in some A. gambiae
samples as many as 55% of the mosquitoes
survived, the group reported in an online
preprint last month.
Corine Ngufor, a medical entomologist at
the London School of Hygiene & Tropical
Medicine, says this appears to be the first
report of clear resistance to clothianidin in
malaria-carrying insects. “It may spread very
quickly and make this new class of insecti-
cide almost useless for malaria vector con-
trol within a few years,” she warns.
Colince Kamdem, who led the study, says
agricultural use of neonicotinoids—the classof chemicals to which clothianidin belongs—
likely drove the emergence of the resistant
mosquito strains. “WHO would never have
recommended this insecticide if such data
were available,” he contends.
Bed nets coated with long-lasting insecti-
cides and indoor spraying have helped halve
malaria mortality and morbidity in the past
2 decades. These programs use four classes
of insecticides but rely most on pyrethroids,
which are cheap and considered safe around
people, Kamdem says.
To combat the rise of pyrethroid-resistant
mosquitoes, WHO added clothianidin to its
“prequalified” list of chemicals acceptable
for indoor spraying (and potentially nets).
Neonicotinoids have become controversial
because of their impacts on pollinators; Eu-
rope has banned their use in agriculture. But
farms in Africa still heavily use them. In ag-
ricultural areas, Kamdem says, pesticide resi-
dues contaminate standing water that serves
as breeding sites for mosquito larvae, favor-
ing the evolution of neonicotinoid resistance.
WHO has not reviewed the Cameroon
study because it has not yet been published
in a peer-reviewed journal, says Deusdedit
Mubangizi, who coordinates the agency’s
“prequalification” assessments, including
those of insecticides used for mosquito con-
trol. But he thinks the chemical could still
be an asset against malaria. “Resistance to
clothianidin is much less prevalent than to
other alternative insecticides in current use,”
he says. How long that will last is the great
unknown—and concern.Munyaradzi Makoni is a journalist based
in Cape Town, South Africa.Malaria fighters’ latest chemical
weapon may not last long
Clothianidin-resistant mosquitoes already seen in Cameroon
INFECTIOUS DISEASEA solution of clothianidin and
another insecticide is sprayed on
the walls of a home in Rwanda.By Munyaradzi MakoniPublished by AAAS