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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @03:03PM
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday October 29 2015, @05:12PM
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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