Mosquitoes should have drug -to -cleanse drugs to clean up their infection so that they can no longer distribute the disease, according to American researchers.
The parasites of malaria, which kill nearly 600,000 people per year, mainly children, are divided by female mosquitoes when they drink blood.
Current efforts are aimed at killing mosquitoes with insecticides rather than curing them malaria.
But a team from Harvard University has found a pair of drugs that can successfully rid the malaria insects when absorbed through their legs. The coating bed nets in the drug cocktail are the long -term goal.
Sleeping under a bed fillet was one of the most successful ways to prevent malaria, because the main widespread mosquitoes in malaria hunt at night.
Vaccines to protect children living in high -risk malaria are also recommended.
The nets are both a physical barrier and also contain insecticides that kill mosquitoes that land on it.
But mosquitoes have become insecticide resistant in many countries, so chemicals no longer kill insects as effectively as before.
“We have not really tried to kill parasites directly in the mosquito before that, because we were only killing the mosquito,” said researcher Dr Alexandra Probst, of Harvard.
However, she says that this approach “does not cut it anymore”.
The researchers analyzed the DNA of malaria to find possible weaknesses while he infects mosquitoes.
They took a large library of potential drugs and reduced it to a limited list of 22. These were tested when female mosquitoes received blood patients contaminated by malaria.
In their article in nature, scientists describe two very effective drugs that have killed 100% of parasites.
The drugs have been tested on materials similar to bed nets.
“Even if this mosquito survives in contact with the bed net, the parasites inside are killed and it therefore still does not transmit malaria,” said Dr. Probst.
“I think it’s a really exciting approach, because it is a completely new way of targeting the mosquitoes themselves.”
She says that the parasite of malaria is less likely to become drug resistant because there are billions in each infected person, but less than five in each mosquito.
The effect of drugs lasts a year on the nets, potentially making a cheap and durable alternative to insecticide, according to researchers.
This approach has been proven in the laboratory. The next step is already planned in Ethiopia to see if the antimaludium bed nets are effective in the real world.
It will take at least six years before all studies are finished to find out if this approach will work.
But the vision is to have bed nets treated with anti-malaria drugs and insecticides so that if one approach does not work, then the other will do it.