Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS AND VIEWS

Battling disease by giving mosquitoes an antimalarial drug

Insecticides that kill mosquitoes have helped to fight malaria, but insecticide resistance is rising. Treating mosquitoes with drugs that target the disease-causing parasite offers another way of tackling malaria.
  1. Janet Hemingway

    1. Janet Hemingway is at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool L3 5QA, UK.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

Any long-term programme for disease control that relies on one type of intervention has a high probability of failure owing to the development of treatment resistance. Efforts to limit malaria by using insecticides to kill female mosquitoes, which transmit the disease-causing Plasmodium parasite, are no exception: mosquito resistance to insecticides is on the increase. Writing in Nature, Paton et al.1 report a non-insecticidal intervention that stops mosquitoes from transmitting malaria and that might offer a way to reduce the reliance on insecticides alone as a means of malaria prevention.

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Nature 567, 185-186 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00648-2

References

  1. Paton, D. G. et al. Nature 567, 239–243 (2019).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Killeen, G. & Ranson, H. Lancet 391, 1551–1552 (2018).

    PubMed  Article  Google Scholar 

  3. World Health Organization. World Malaria Report 2018 (WHO, 2018).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bhatt, S. et al. Nature 526, 207–211 (2015).

    PubMed  Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Churcher, T. S., Lissenden, N., Griffin, J. T., Worrall, E. & Ranson, H. eLife 5, e16090 (2016).

    PubMed  Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Protopopoff, N. & Rowland, M. Lancet 391, 2415–2416 (2018).

    PubMed  Article  Google Scholar 

  7. World Health Organization. Global Plan for Insecticide Resistance Management in Malaria Vectors (WHO, 2012).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Hemingway, J. et al. Lancet 387, 1785–1788 (2016).

    PubMed  Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links