Malaria is an infectious disease carried by mosquitoes. Many communities in Africa and Asia best treatment is in prevention, using insect repellents and nets to sleep in and. This inexpensive deworming pill kills the mosquito once it bites a human who has consumed the medicine, reducing the number of mosquitoes able to pass disease amongst inhabitants. Via The New York Times:
Scientists have proposed an intriguing new way to fight malaria: turning people into human time bombs for mosquitoes.
A cheap deworming pill used in Africa for 25 years against river blindness was recently shown to have a power that scientists had long suspected but never before demonstrated in the field: When mosquitoes bite people who have recently swallowed the drug — called ivermectin or Mectizan — they die.
Other scientists caution that while the mosquito-poisoning trick is pretty nifty, it is not very practical: For it to work effectively, nearly everyone in a mosquito-infested area must take the pills simultaneously.
Getting thousands of villagers to do that even in annual deworming campaigns is a logistical nightmare, scientists said. The mosquito-killing effect appears to fade out within a month, so it would need to be repeated monthly.
[Continues at NY Times]
