Mosquitoes are more than pests. They’re also a mortal threat, contributing to millions of cases of malaria a year. Fortunately for humans, however, a team of researchers has recently identified a medication that could curb mosquito populations, controlling their spread of malaria.
Revealing their results in a paper published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers report that the medication nitisinone makes human blood deadly to mosquitoes.
“One way to stop the spread of diseases transmitted by [mosquitoes] is to make the blood of animals and humans toxic to these blood-feeding insects,” said Lee R. Haines, a paper author and an associate research professor of biology at the University of Notre Dame, according to a press release. “Our findings suggest that using nitisinone could be a promising new complementary tool for controlling insect-borne diseases like malaria.”
