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