For many thousands of years, whenever a mosquito has landed on a human being, the option has been pretty much just one thing: Swat it and kill it.
But this is the 21st century. And we do things the science way now. So instead of slapping the little buggers, we're going to...
...uh, poison them with our own blood?
Scientists have a radical new plan for controlling mosquito numbers and fighting malaria: lacing human blood with a drug that's poisonous for the insects, so sucking on this blood marks their last meal.
The drug in question is nitisinone, and a proof-of-concept study led by a team from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK found that it could be deadly to mosquitoes at a low dose in human blood.
I gotta admit, sometimes at the peak of summer, the bloodsuckers get bad enough that I'll want to inject myself with a drug to turn my blood into a deadly weapon and kill them all.
Sounds like it works: Scientists found that when mosquitos "fed on the blood of three people who were already taking nitisinone to treat a genetic disorder, the insects died within 12 hours."
(Not sure how they found the mosquitos to confirm that.)
Nitisinone works in humans by "blocking the production of a specific protein, which leads to reduced toxic disease byproducts in the human body." It's used to treat rare genetic disorders.
According to the researchers, the drug kills mosquitos by blocking "a crucial enzyme that mosquitoes need to digest their blood meal."
And boy, this thing will take care of every last blood-sucking varmint in the bayou:
When female Anopheles mosquitoes in the laboratory consumed blood containing nitisinone, the drug was lethal to young, old, and insecticide-resistant populations and outperformed the mosquitocidal drug ivermectin. Even at low therapeutic doses, nitisinone remained deadly to mosquitoes.
I'm not sure how they're going to get people taking this drug in order to get it into the mosquito population. But the scientists say the substance "warrants further investigation as a complementary intervention for vector control and the prevention of malaria transmission."
Maybe one day we'll no longer need to use our hands to kill these awful bugs!
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