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In a first-of-its-kind study, a drug called ivermectin – commonly prescribed to treat different parasite infestations and more recently also the symptoms of rosacea – was found to make human blood highly toxic to mosquitoes, which could be used to reduce the spread of malaria with only minor side effects.
Trials in rural Burkina Faso, conducted by a team of researchers from Colorado State University, have shown that using the drug in young children reduces new cases of malaria by as many as 20 per cent, and that in combination with medications used to tackle outbreaks ivermectin could slow down mosquitoes‘ ability to resist the disease.
“Ivermectin reduces new cases of malaria by making a person’s blood lethal to mosquitoes who bite them, killing mosquitoes and therefore reducing the likelihood of infection of others,” said Dr Brian Foy, co-author on the study published in the top medical journal The Lancet.
For the purposes of the single-blind 18-week study, researchers enrolled 2,700 people, including 590 children, from eight villages during the 2015 rainy season and gave half of them (the intervention group) a dose of ivermectin every three weeks. Subjects then received regular visits from nurses to check for symptoms of malaria (confirmed by a blood test).
A new study has found that a common anti-parasitic drug ivermectin is lethal to mosquitoes who bite those who have taken it during the past several weeks, which could help fight both the spread of malaria and its resistance to drugs used to treat it. Image: John Tann via flickr.com, CC BY 2.0
Results showed that children assigned to the intervention group suffered 2 malaria attacks per child, while children in the control villages saw 2.49 attacks per child, which comes out to a roughly 20 per cent higher incidence.
“Overall, the results from this study suggest that frequently repeated ivermectin mass drug administrations to village residents did not obviously increase drug-related harms in the treated population, and provided health benefits by significantly decreasing clinical malaria episodes in young children,” wrote the researchers in their paper.
New approaches like the one described in the study are now sorely needed because of the growing resistance of mosquitoes to the drugs typically used to treat malaria in patients.
Sources: study, independent.co.uk