Malaria is one of the biggest health problems in Africa, accounting for some 90 percent of cases and deaths.
The costs of health services to diagnose it, drugs to treat it, and its effect on productivity continue to be the bane of economic progress on the continent.
Over the years, people have devised ways to bring a life-saving solution to the disease.
Last week, a new research said high doses of ivermectin, a pill used to fight parasites, can make human blood poisonous to mosquitoes and kill them.
The new study, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases medical journal, was conducted in Kenya by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
It revealed that the blood of patients, who took high doses of ivermectin (600mcg/kg or 300mg/kg) in pill form over three days remained poisonous to mosquitoes for up to 28 days.
“The most exciting result was the fact that even one month after (the subjects took) ivermectin, their blood was still killing mosquitoes,” Dr Menno Smit of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine was quoted by Sacbee.
“That’s much longer than we thought.”
The researchers fed the mosquitoes in cages using blood samples taken from 47 volunteers.
“We put the blood in an artificial membrane that mosquitoes could bite on and then watched,” Smit said.
He said most died within a week, and 97 percent died within two weeks.
The Kenya Medical Research Institute and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also participated in the research.
