NewsHail
22 May 2025
Malaria kills nearly 600,000 people each year, mostly children. Female mosquitoes spread it when they drink blood.
Right now, most efforts try to kill mosquitoes with insect spray. But a team at Harvard found a new way. They tested two drugs that remove malaria from mosquitoes. The drugs work when the mosquito touches them with its legs. The goal is to put these drugs on bed nets.
Bed nets already help stop malaria. The mosquitoes that spread it usually bite at night. Nets stop the bites and also have bug spray to kill the insects.
But in many places, mosquitoes no longer die from the spray. It doesn’t work as well as it used to.
Dr. Alexandra Probst from Harvard said we used to only try to kill the mosquito. But now, that method is not enough.
So the team studied the malaria parasite's genes to find weak spots. They looked at many drugs and picked 22 to test. They fed malaria-infected blood to mosquitoes and tested the drugs.
In the journal Nature, they wrote about two drugs that killed all the malaria in the mosquitoes. They tested the drugs on material like bed nets.
Dr. Probst said, "Even if the mosquito lives after landing on the net, the malaria inside it dies. So it can’t spread the disease."
She also said it’s hard for the parasite to resist these drugs. In a person, there are billions of parasites. But in a mosquito, there are fewer than five. That means it’s harder for the parasite to change and survive.
The drugs stay active on the nets for a year. That makes them cheap and long-lasting. The next step is to test them in real homes in Ethiopia.
It will take about six years to finish all the tests. But the goal is clear: bed nets with both bug spray and malaria-killing drugs. If one method fails, the other can still work.
