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Battling disease by giving mosquitoes an antimalarial drug

Insecticides that kill mosquitoes have helped to fight malaria, but insecticide resistance is rising. Treating mosquitoes with drugs that target the disease-causing parasite offers another way of tackling malaria.
  1. Janet Hemingway

    1. Janet Hemingway is at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool L3 5QA, UK.

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Any long-term programme for disease control that relies on one type of intervention has a high probability of failure owing to the development of treatment resistance. Efforts to limit malaria by using insecticides to kill female mosquitoes, which transmit the disease-causing Plasmodium parasite, are no exception: mosquito resistance to insecticides is on the increase. Writing in Nature, Paton et al.1 report a non-insecticidal intervention that stops mosquitoes from transmitting malaria and that might offer a way to reduce the reliance on insecticides alone as a means of malaria prevention.

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Nature 567, 185-186 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00648-2

References

  1. Paton, D. G. et al. Nature 567, 239–243 (2019).

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  2. Killeen, G. & Ranson, H. Lancet 391, 1551–1552 (2018).

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  3. World Health Organization. World Malaria Report 2018 (WHO, 2018).

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  4. Bhatt, S. et al. Nature 526, 207–211 (2015).

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  8. Hemingway, J. et al. Lancet 387, 1785–1788 (2016).

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