A drug used to treat a rare inherited disease has been found to make human blood toxic to malaria-carrying mosquitoes. It could provide another tool to reduce deadly insect populations.
Mosquitoes are considered the deadliest animal on the planet—carrying diseases that kill more than one million people a year. Scientists have found that a drug called nitisinone, which is used to treat people with a rare inherited disease called tyrosinemia, makes human blood toxic to mosquitoes.
Although it does not prevent the transmission of the malaria parasite Plasmodium, nitisinone is now being considered for further field tests as a chemical control to reduce the number of insects capable of spreading the disease.
What is the mosquito-killing drug?
Nitisinone is used to treat hereditary tyrosinemia type 1, which is a disease where…