IVERMECTIN, a drug employed for the treatment of worm infections, has a side effect. It has been known since the 1980s that it kills arthropods (ticks, mites, insects and so on) foolish enough to bite someone treated with it. That has led some researchers to wonder if it might be deployed deliberately against the mosquitoes which transmit malaria. Preliminary studies suggested so. Mosquitoes do, indeed, get poisoned when they bite people who have taken the drug. Moreover, even if a mosquito does not succumb, ivermectin imbibed this way is often enough to kill any malarial parasites it is carrying. And, since ivermectin is routinely deployed en masse to deal with lymphatic filariasis (a nasty disease that can lead to extreme swelling of limbs and genitalia), river blindness and so on, it might already be expected to be having an effect. What no one had measured, though, was the size of that effect.
A paper presented by Brian Foy of Colorado State University, to this year’s meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, in Philadelphia, has changed that. Dr Foy and his colleagues ran a small clinical trial in Burkina Faso that is the first to measure the...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1Wg3VbJ
EmoticonEmoticon