Malaria is one of the world’s deadliest diseases. It kills a child under the age of 5 every minutes, and over 600,000 people every year. This is a reality that SC Johnson is working hard to change, and has been through their continuous involvement and pioneering work in the fight against insect borne disease for over 60 years.

Global instances of malaria are on the rise due to external and environmental factors like insecticide resistance, increased global temperature and higher annual rainfalls, so the need to protect people is greater than ever.

Guardian™ was developed to help prevent the spread of, and potentially help eliminate malaria. Its incredible effectiveness, coupled with its ease of use and distribution means it is designed to be more accessible and usable than most other interventions. It requires no power or maintenance from the user, is a simple fit-and-forget product and is therefore a more practical solution for the more remote rural communities where malaria is most prevalent.

Guardian™ is awaiting official WHO approval - but this takes time. Time people in malaria-stricken communities don’t have. Until this happens, SCJ’s objective is simple: to work with as many partners as needed to get as many Guardians™ into the communities that need them as quickly as possible, saving lives in the process.

Malaria is an entirely preventable disease, but has been killing people for thousands of years. Current interventions have limited effectiveness and duration.

The challenges for many solutions are access (rural, hard-to-reach areas are most affected by malaria), maintenance (burners that require constant flame) and power (many rural locations have no, or only very limited, power supplies), while traditional nets are often repurposed for fishing (people choosing between hunger and malaria).

SC Johnson set about creating Guardian™ as a highly innovative, incredibly effective response to these obstacles. Developed with the ambition of delivering the highest levels of protection for the longest duration possible while maintaining consistent levels of effectiveness in the most challenging conditions (high humidity and temperature). Guardian™ was created to get a practical, usable, and highly effective intervention into these households and communities.

Guardian™ is a highly innovative, incredibly effective solution, yet it needs a formal WHO policy recommendation as a public health intervention to reach the millions of people who are most vulnerable and who need it most. Until then, SCJ is working with its partners to distribute Guardian™ as widely as possible.

SC Johnson’s ultimate challenge is simple: Help Save Lives.

A necessary step was creating a product that would dramatically reduce the infection rates of malaria in communities. One that offered long-term, easy-to-use and highly effective protection from mosquito bites that could safeguard entire villages, not just individual households.

Creating something like this required decades of research and a huge, sustained collaborative effort from scientific institutions, NGOs and charitable foundations. SCJ drove, organized and funded the creation, trial and testing of this new solution to prevent the spread of malaria.

Guardian™’s innovation lies mostly in simplicity. Finding the right combination of complex elements to deliver an intervention that would last a full year with the same potency throughout, while being simple to distribute at scale, easy to install and use and which could be distributed globally at minimal cost. Guardian™ works with the airflow of enclosed, or partially enclosed spaces, using the circulation to distribute slow-release repellent, so it can be simply placed and then protects entire families.

Guardian™ is currently being reviewed by the WHO. If approved, it will be the first major malaria intervention to be recommended for over 25 years.

Guardian™ is a simple-to-use, highly effective spatial repellent product that has shown to reduce mosquito bites by up to 91%. Initial testing has shown it to be even more effective in some cases against malarial vectors, including against insecticide-resistant mosquitoes.

The long-lasting, slow-release repellent means households can simply place Guardian™ in their home and be assured that they have effective protection for their entire household from the malaria-carrying mosquitos for an entire year. The lack of required power or maintenance also means that Guardian™ is simple and versatile enough to work with the lives of those in the most remote places, who are most at risk.

Multiple households within the same communities all using Guardian™ help protect the entire population, as the collective, cumulative use of these repellents creates a protection ‘bubble’ within the village or town – making the effectiveness even more complete.

To-date, over one million people have been protected by Guardian™. Should the WHO recommend Guardian™ as a public health intervention, as many as an additional 20 million people could be protected every year.

Guardian™ never has, and never will have a profit motive for SC Johnson. It is an entirely not-for-profit product. They can’t wait to give it, at no-cost, to as many people who need it as possible.

The development of the Guardian™ product delivered a low-cost, fit-and-forget mosquito spatial repellent - and a huge step towards the elimination of malaria. A single Guardian™ provides an entire household protection from mosquitoes for 12 months, with up to a 91% proven reduction in mosquito bites wherever it has been trialled. When used across an entire village, it provides a whole community with protection from infection.

The more places Guardian™ can be, the more people can be protected and the more lives can be saved. Following WHO approval, Guardian™ could protect over 20M people from malaria every year.

1M+ people protected by Guardian™ & Mosquito Shield™ to date

An overall 91% reduction in mosquito bite rates in households and communities

$30 Million committed funding by SC Johnson for spatial repellent production in Kenya

147 Congressional offices visited

5 New Partnerships Established: The Global Fund, United Nations Foundation, Kenya Ministry of Health, Tanzania Ministry of Health, Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete Foundation