Ivermectin, a medicine employed for the treatment of nematode-worm infections, has a side-effect. It has been known since the 1980s that the drug kills arthropods (ticks, mites, insects and so on) foolish enough to bite someone treated with it. That has led some researchers to wonder if it might be deployed deliberately against the mosquitoes which transmit malaria. Preliminary studies suggested so. Mosquitoes do, indeed, get poisoned when they bite people who have taken the drug. Moreover, even if a mosquito does not succumb, ivermectin imbibed this way is often enough to kill any malarial parasites it is carrying. And, since ivermectin is routinely deployed en masse to deal with lymphatic filariasis (a nasty disease that can lead to extreme swelling of limbs and gen-italia), river blindness and so on, it might already be expected to be having an effect. What no one had measured, though, was the size of that effect.
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