Promising New Bed Net Strategy To Zap Malaria Parasite In Mosquitoes
Progress against malaria has stalled. Now a team is trying a new tactic.
What if, instead of killing mosquitoes that carry malaria, we tried to kill the tiny malaria parasite inside the skeeters before they could pass it on to humans when they bit?
That's a question that occurred to Flaminia Catteruccia and Doug Paton; she's a lab head and he's a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Decades of progress against the disease have stalled in recent years, prompting many to rethink our best tool in the fight – insecticide-treated bed nets.
The World Health Organization credits insecticide-treated bed nets with preventing an 1.3 billion cases of malaria and 6.8 million deaths from the disease since the year 2000. But there's concern that mosquitoes
