An inexpensive and safe deworming medicine that has been used on dogs and livestock all over the world for more than 25 years can kill mosquitoes.
The medicine is Ivermectin, and it's a wonderfully effective and cheap medicine for heartworm.
Ivermectin remains effective inside an animal or human body for about a month, and it turn out that when all the humans in a region plagued by malaria take this low-dose insectide, the incidence of malaria can drop by 80%. As The New York Times notes:
They vacuumed mosquitoes from the walls of huts in three villages whose inhabitants had recently been given Ivermectin and three whose had not, and tested to see how many mosquitoes contained malaria parasites.
The Ivermectin villages had almost 80 percent fewer.
The drug was shortening the mosquitoes’ lives, explained the lead author, Brian D. Foy, a Colorado State mosquito expert. Only older insects transmit malaria, since they must get it from humans first.
Of course, more research to be done. Dosing a human life for 80 years is not the same equation as dosing a dog for 12, and getting everyone to take Ivermectin may be impossible, so mosquito nets will always have a place, but still... pretty interesting.
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