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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: 3, Insightful) by richtopia on Wednesday October 28 2015, @03:42PM
I'm not sure how expensive Ivermectin is, but the nature of this deployment scheme would allow to use any large bodied mammal to be a transmitter (looks like Ivermectin's main concern is neurotoxicity, hence the large mammal comment - I have no qualifications for this statement beyond reading wikipedia). Being taken orally, you could start including small doses in animal feed in at risk countries, allowing a much higher deployment than humans only.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday October 28 2015, @04:41PM
I'm not sure how expensive Ivermectin is
I find the chemistry and business angle interesting, so I researched it.
For a human the MBAs and marketing algos and eighty layers of middlemen and corruption have determined that about five bucks per daily pill dose maximizes profit.
For veterinary purposes a cat-mass daily dose in bulk injectable form costs about ten cents per daily injection. Note that cats don't weigh that much (well, some are fatter than others...) and the daily injection cost of worming a large farm livestock is not a laughing matter, especially if you have a herd of a couple hundred cattle. A thousand pound (hundred cat) steer times a couple hundred in a herd times a couple days treatment, suddenly that's a substantial amount of dough. Although for a guy who owns a couple hundred head that kind of cost is probably the least of your concerns LOL.
If you figure I weigh about "ten housecats", well for some value of "housecat" anyway, the injectable dose is maybe a fifth the cost of oral human rated pill. Obviously just like fish antibiotics its all the same stuff off the same assembly line but one is human rate and somewhat expensive, the other not so much.
Technically a fraction of the worming dose will prevent heartworms and the like in pets. However, its kind of inhumane to inject a housepet every day unless it really needs it. So everyone else pays more for the higher oral dose.
Insert usual disclaimer that anyone getting pharmaceutical medical advice from SN is obviously showing signs of mental illness indicating their internet license should be revoked.
The problem with small oral dose in all food or whatever is you'll inevitably run into the "if some is good, a thousand times more is a thousand times better!" and they'll kill a bunch of people, just like steroid users. Also once the various intestinal and heart worms build up an immunity (assuming they aren't totally wiped out, of course...) then we'll just have to use something more toxic, dangerous, expensive, or all of the above to worm people and pets and livestock.
I wonder how much DDT I'd have to eat, if thats physiologically sustainable to kill mosquitos. If I were an egg laying bird I'd be totally Fed with DDT in my diet, but I'm not, AFAIK.
Something interesting to think about is from memory when I searched the livestock time till slaughter is like 45 days. So maybe you'd only need a mosquito killing dose every month or so. Maybe.
Note that its a lot more effective and long term and in the end, cheaper, to simply eliminate standing water and all that stuff. There's always some jackass in every neighborhood with a mosquito breeding back yard, but there are ways to "fix" that.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday October 28 2015, @05:18PM
Interesting post. Malaria in the animal population is something that isn't talked about much, but eliminating it in humans won't do much good if there's a pool of it in livestock just waiting to cross back over.
> Note that its a lot more effective and long term and in the end, cheaper, to simply eliminate standing water and all that stuff. There's always some jackass in every neighborhood with a mosquito breeding back yard, but there are ways to "fix" that.
I am optimistic that malaria will be extinct within my lifetime. It's a well understood disease, it's a high priority for all sorts of influential organisations, there are many ways to attack it, and it has already been completely wiped out in certain parts of the globe. The only thing that prevents us from finishing the job is the sad political and economic state of the third world. However despite this progress is already being made.
As you say though, every attempt to fix the problem is hampered by ignorant people acting against their own best interests. This is why I think malaria will be killed with a combined approach. This drug will only be part of the solution. Reducing standing water will be another part, along with mosquito nets, perhaps those GM-mozzies that produce sterile eggs, fricking laser beams and who knows what else.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday October 29 2015, @12:46AM
fricking laser beams
That won't work, how do you get the sharks to where the mosquitos live?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday October 29 2015, @02:38AM
Ivermectin can be injected or given orally or even used as a topical. It's very safe -- I know a guy (a veterinarian who is a parasite specialist, as it happens) who took the full dose every day for six months to prevent coming down with river blindness (common in the tropical area where he was working). No ill effects whatever.
The best way to dose a third-world village might be to provide it in drinking water.
The main thing with ivermectin is don't underdose it. The usual "cat and dog" dose for heartworm prevention errs on the side of minimal, which as it turns out is why we're now seeing some "resistance" -- but it's actually not resistance; it's that once a month isn't often enough to catch the occasional juvenile heartworm at the brink of maturity, and the prevention dose isn't enough to kill them after that. The fix is to dose twice a month, so none age through the cracks, so to speak. On a 2x-month schedule, the prevention dose has zero breaks.
Yeah, the Rx pill price is ridiculous. Some years ago I did the math for my kennel, and the Rx pill came to $1500/year, while buying it as cattle wormer came to $2.00/year at the heartworm-preventive dose, or about $50/year at the full dose that also kills most intestinal and external parasites (which makes it a lot more economical than other treatments). Well, there's a no-brainer...
https://www.valleyvet.com/ct_detail.html?pgguid=3d70c03d-e24f-4641-8145-5f0a3748c827 [valleyvet.com]
(And I see that by lollygagging with my current order that I hadn't got round to finishing up, I'm about to save $20. Cool!)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @10:58PM
It can do strange things to your digestive system. Not anything I would inflict on the general population. Guts seizing up etc. Not good.