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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: 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.