Scientists have discovered drugs that can kill the malaria parasites that live inside mosquitoes. That could be a crucial malaria-control method in countries where mosquitoes have developed resistance to insecticides. The BBC reports:
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.
But a team at Harvard University has found a pair of drugs which can successfully rid the insects of malaria when absorbed through their legs. Coating bed nets in the drug cocktail is the long-term aim…Nets are both a physical barrier and also contain insecticides which kill mosquitoes that land on them. But mosquitoes have become resistant to insecticide in many countries so the chemicals no longer kill the insects as effectively as they used to….
The researchers analyzed malaria’s DNA to find possible weak spots while it is infecting mosquitoes. They took a large library of potential drugs and narrowed it down to a shortlist of 22. These were tested when female mosquitoes were given a blood-meal contaminated with malaria….Two highly-effective drugs killed 100% of the parasites. The drugs were tested on material similar to bed nets. “Even if that mosquito survives contact with the bed net, the parasites within are killed and so it’s still not transmitting malaria,” said Dr Probst….the malaria parasite is less likely to become resistant to the drugs as there are billions of them in each infected person, but less than five in each mosquito.
The effect of the drugs lasts for a year on the nets, potentially making it a cheap and long-lasting alternative to insecticide….This approach has been proven in the laboratory. The next stage is already planned in Ethiopia to see if the anti-malarial bed nets are effective in the real world. It will take at least six years before all the studies are completed.
In the past, researchers have come up with different methods of changing the microbes within mosquitoes. For example, Brazil and Honduras have released millions of bacteria-infected mosquitoes to fight dengue fever.
Dengue fever — a tropical disease so painful it is also known as “breakbone fever” — spread into parts of Florida, Texas, and Arizona. In 2023, there were 11 cases of locally-acquired dengue fever in Florida. It could become much more widespread in the U.S. in the future.
So it is good to learn that scientists have come up with a vaccine that prevents dengue fever 80% of the time, at least in the short run.
Having more effective mosquito repellents would also be helpful to protect against diseases like dengue and malaria.
“Scientists in Israel have developed a new kind of ‘chemical camouflage’ that could more effectively keep pesky mosquito bites at bay,” reports Euro News. But it will take years before it is available in the U.S., thanks to America’s incredibly slow Food and Drug Administration.
The Food and Drug Administration keeps the most effective sunscreens off the U.S. market. It may do the same with this mosquito repellent, just as the Obama administration impeded anti-mosquito remedies during an outbreak of the disease Zika, which results in birth defects. As Washington University in St. Louis notes, “Due to Zika virus, more than 1,600 babies were born in Brazil with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads, from September 2015 through April 2016.” The Obama administration banned a life-saving pesticide, preventing it from being used to kill mosquitos carrying this awful disease, even though, as the New York Post noted at the time, Zika “infected nearly 300 pregnant women in the United States, putting their babies at risk for a devastating birth defect. . . . hundreds of babies are at risk of a horrifying brain defect called microcephaly. Infants who don’t perish outright need extensive care, which can cost up to $10 million.”
The FDA blocks new innovations that will protect your skin. Insider reports that the “US has awful sunscreen compared to Asia and Europe. Strict, decades-old FDA rules are to blame.” “European and Asian sunscreens boast stronger and smoother formulas than sunscreens found in the US. That’s because the FDA is slower to approve new UV filters compared to other countries.”
