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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday October 28 2015, @01:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-to-bite-the-bugs-back dept.

The Economist notes of a possible new medication to fight malaria:

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.

It's one thing to protect yourself from malaria, but the notion that the buggers will likely croak for biting me is quite enticing.

I googled and found the studies mentioned at MalariaJournal.com and at researchgate.net. The full text of the study can be downloaded here.

The second study mentioned in the article can be read at pubfacts.com, with a full text of the study downloadable from here.


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  • (Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Wednesday October 28 2015, @02:33PM

    by iWantToKeepAnon (686) on Wednesday October 28 2015, @02:33PM (#255594) Homepage Journal
    We have superbugs because people take too many antibiotics for little to no reason. What about the mosquitoes that can survive this drug, then mate with other survivors? Will we create a super mosquito carrying a super malaria?
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @02:36PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @02:36PM (#255596)

    So no treatment unless it's 100% effective?

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday October 28 2015, @03:28PM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday October 28 2015, @03:28PM (#255623) Journal

    scenario 1:
    - deploy drug
    - some lives are saved.
    - Oh no, we created a mosquito+malaria combo that is immune to that particular drug
    - back to where we before.

    scenario 2:
    - don't deploy drug
    - shit continues now as it did before.

    Scenario 1 is clearly better, because at least you saved some lives in step 2. The new "supermalaria" is no more deadly than the old one, it's just immune to one treatment.

    Personally, I'd be hoping for either scenario 3:
    - deploy drug
    - save lives
    - bugs fail to adapt to it
    - continue saving lives

    or scenario 4:
    - deploy drug on massive scale, in conjunction with other anti-malaria measures.
    - mosquitoes and malaria reproduction rates fall drastically.
    - repeat as necessary
    - malaria extinct!
    - everybody party.

    And before anyone starts complaining about removing mozzies from the ecosystem, we'd only be targeting those that bite humans. Plenty of other mosquito species would survive to fill the ecological niche. Also, I think we'd probably kill malaria before we made that particular species of mosquito extinct. It might be endangered for a while, but tough shit. I'm an environmentalist and under most circumstances I would deplore the thought of wantonly making a whole insect species extinct, but in the case of disease-carrying mosquitoes (which are probably responsible for more premature deaths throughout human history than any other cause) then I'm prepared to make an exception.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tibman on Wednesday October 28 2015, @03:48PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 28 2015, @03:48PM (#255642)

    At some point that doesn't scale or make sense. If you keep shooting people then you won't end up with people who become bullet resistant. You end up with people who hide!

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @03:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @03:03PM (#256057)
      Wow, strawman much?
      • (Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday October 29 2015, @05:12PM

        by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 29 2015, @05:12PM (#256113)

        Fine : ) Poisoning mosquitoes could lead to mosquitoes becoming resistant to that specific poison if there are survivors. At some point evolution ceases to function in providing resistance because there can be no survival. The selection pressure would favor those mosquitoes that hide. Have you ever encountered a bug that is resistant to a bug zapper? You have bugs that avoid the zapper and dead bugs that encountered the zapper.

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  • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday October 28 2015, @04:45PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Wednesday October 28 2015, @04:45PM (#255681)

    Why would that create "super malaria"?

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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 28 2015, @07:13PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 28 2015, @07:13PM (#255737) Journal

      Because if imbibing the drug doesn't kill the mosquito, then it kills the malaria parasite within the mosquito...so the parasite also has pressure to adapt.

      Personally, I expect that the mosquitos would just evolve to find people repellent...but perhaps I'm too optomistic. (But that's the main way they evolved to resist DDT.)

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