Mosquitoes should be given malaria drugs to clear their infection so they can no longer spread the disease, say US researchers.
Malaria parasites, which kill nearly 600,000 people a year, mostly children, are spread by female mosquitoes when they drink blood.
Current efforts aim to kill mosquitoes with insecticide rather than curing them of malaria.
“We haven’t really tried to directly kill parasites in the mosquito before this, because we were just killing the mosquito,” says researcher Dr Alexandra Probst, from Harvard.
The next stage is already planned in Ethiopia to see if the anti-malarial bed nets are effective in the real world.
According to US researchers, mosquitoes should be treated with malaria medications to eradicate their infection and prevent them from spreading the illness.
Almost 600,000 people, mostly children, die from malaria parasites each year, which are spread by female mosquitoes that consume blood.
The goal of current efforts is not to cure mosquitoes of malaria, but to kill them with insecticide.
However, when absorbed through the insects’ legs, a pair of medications discovered by a Harvard University team can effectively cure them of malaria. The long-term goal is to coat bed nets with the drug cocktail.
One of the most effective methods of preventing malaria is to sleep under a bed net because the primary mosquitoes that spread the disease hunt at night.
Additionally advised are vaccines to protect children residing in high-risk malaria areas.
Nets include insecticides that kill mosquitoes that land on them in addition to acting as a physical barrier.
Insecticides no longer kill mosquitoes as well as they once did, though, because mosquitoes have developed resistance to them in many nations.
“Until now, we were only killing the mosquito, so we haven’t really tried to kill parasites in the mosquito directly,” says Harvard researcher Dr. Alexandra Probst.
That strategy, she claims, is “no longer cutting it.”.
In order to identify potential weak points in malaria’s transmission through mosquitoes, the researchers examined the virus’s DNA.
They reduced a vast collection of possible medications to a shortlist of 22. When female mosquitoes were fed a blood meal tainted with malaria, these were tested.
According to the scientists’ article in Nature, two extremely potent medications completely eradicated the parasites.
Materials that resembled bed nets were used to test the medications.
Dr. Probst stated that “the parasites within are killed and so it’s still not transmitting malaria even if that mosquito survives contact with the bed net.”.
Given that it’s a completely novel strategy for going after mosquitoes directly, I think this is a really exciting approach. “..”.
She claims that because each infected person has billions of the malaria parasite, but each mosquito has fewer than five, the parasite is less likely to develop resistance to the medications.
According to the researchers, the drugs have a one-year effect on the nets, which could make them an affordable and durable substitute for insecticide.
This strategy has been validated in the lab. Ethiopia has already scheduled the following phase to determine the practical effectiveness of the anti-malarial bed nets.
The completion of all the studies necessary to determine whether this strategy will be successful will take at least six years.
However, the idea is to treat bed nets with both insecticide and anti-malaria medications so that, in the event that one method fails, the other will.
