Nitisinone is a prescription drug used to treat diseases like tyrosinemia, which harms your liver and kidney.
The drug also turns out to have a nice side effect: it kills mosquitos that bite you when you are taking the drug. Dr. Henry Miller observes that the blood of a person taking even low doses of the drug can kill mosquitos within a day, offering an exciting new method of mosquito control: “Nitisinone appears to be effective at much lower doses than previously expected. Even blood from people taking small amounts of the drug proved lethal to mosquitoes. This means that individuals in malaria-endemic regions could potentially take a safe low dose of nitisinone, turning their blood into a mosquito-killing agent without significant side effects.”
Science Daily adds:
Several methods are currently used to reduce mosquito numbers and malaria risk. One of these includes the antiparasitic medication ivermectin. When mosquitoes ingest blood containing ivermectin, it shortens the insect’s lifespan and helps decrease the spread of malaria.
However, ivermectin has its own issues. Not only is it environmentally toxic, but also, when it is overused to treat people and animals with worm and parasite infections, resistance to ivermectin becomes a concern.
Now a study in Science Translational Medicine has identified another medication with the potential to suppress mosquito populations to help control malaria. Researchers found when patients take the drug nitisinone, their blood becomes deadly to mosquitoes…
Nitisinone was shown to last longer than ivermectin in the human bloodstream, and was able to kill not only mosquitoes of all ages — including the older ones that are most likely to transmit malaria — but also the hardy mosquitoes resistant to traditional insecticides…
Next, the research team aims to explore a semi-field trial to determine what nitisinone dosages are best linked to mosquitocidal efficacy in the field.
