Ivermectin's Potential in the Fight Against Malaria

A new study in Kenya shows that mass drug administration of ivermectin safely reduced malaria cases by 26%, offering a promising supplement to insecticide-based prevention. Transcript Bed nets and insecticides are commonly used to prevent malaria transmission. But insecticide resistance is making those tools less effective. There's a growing interest in ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug normally used to treat neglected tropical diseases such as river blindness or scabies, that is also capable of killing the Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit malaria. In a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from ISGlobal, an institute in Barcelona, investigated whether ivermectin given to at-risk populations en masse – in a policy of 'mass drug administration' – might supplement the use of insecticides to reduce malaria transmission. In Kwale, a coastal county in Kenya where malaria is present year-round, nearly twenty-nine thousand people took part. Half were given ivermectin at 400μg per kilogram of bodyweight. The other half were given 400mg of albendazole, not an antimalarial drug, but an anti-worming drug comparable to ivermectin. Each group took the drug once a month for three months. The study looked at both the efficacy and safety of the two interventions. Both drugs proved safe, but ivermectin had a greater impact, leading to a 26% reduction in malaria cases – higher than the 20% efficacy benchmark set by the World Health Organization. Source Source: Ivermectin to Control Malaria — A Cluster-Randomized Trial [NEJM] About The Podcast The Johns Hopkins Malaria Minute podcast is produced by the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute to highlight impactful malaria research and to share it with the global community.