Malaria has been confirmed as the mystery illness that killed 52 people in the DRC earlier this year and affected nearly 1 000 others, said officials.
The announcement coincides with British scientists identifying a medication which could suppress the mosquito population and control malaria, and traditionally used for treating rare diseases.
In the DRC cases, symptoms exhibited by victims included fever, fatigue, vomiting, and weight loss. Initially suspected to be either malaria or food poisoning, the illness was identified after lab testing on patient samples, but officials are still awaiting the results of tests on food, water, and drink samples, reports africanews.
A separate malaria outbreak in December, also initially unidentified, has also been confirmed as malaria.
Meanwhile, in a breakthrough, scientists have discovered a drug that makes human blood deadly to mosquitoes. They said the treatment is able to kill older mosquitoes that are most likely to transmit malaria, reports The Independent.
Several methods are currently used to reduce mosquito numbers and the accompanying malaria risk. One is the use of the anti-parasitic Ivermectin, which when ingested by the insects, shortens their lifespan.
Now, the study published in Science Translation Medicine has identified another medication, nitisinone, which has the potential to suppress the mosquito population and control malaria.
“One way to stop the spread of diseases transmitted by insects is to make the blood of animals and humans toxic to these blood-feeding insects,” said Lee Haines, associate Research Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, honorary Fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and co-lead author of the study.
“Our findings suggest that using nitisinone could be a promising new complementary tool for controlling insect-borne diseases like malaria.”
This medication is typically used for patients with a rare inherited disease, such as alkaptonuria and tyrosinemia type 1, whose bodies struggle to break down the protein building block or amino acid tyrosine.
The drug works by blocking a type of enzyme called 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase (HPPD). Blocking this prevents the build-up of harmful disease byproducts in the human body.
However, when a mosquito drinks blood containing the drug, it also blocks this HPPD enzyme in their bodies which prevents the insect from digesting the blood, causing them to die quickly.
Four people diagnosed with alkaptonuria donated their blood for the study, which was fed to female anopheles gambiae mosquitoes – the primary mosquito species responsible for spreading malaria in many African countries.
The researchers explored what concentrations of the drug are needed to kill mosquitoes and compared its effectiveness to Ivermectin.
Nitisinone was shown to last longer than Ivermectin in the human bloodstream and was able to kill not only mosquitoes of all ages, including the older ones that are most likely to transmit malaria — but also the hardy mosquitoes resistant to traditional insecticides.
Mosquitoes that were fed the drug first lost the ability to fly and then rapidly progressed to full paralysis and death, the study authors said.
“In the future, it could be advantageous to alternate both nitisinone and Ivermectin for mosquito control,” Haines said. “For example, nitisinone could be employed in areas where Ivermectin resistance persists or where Ivermectin is already heavily used for livestock and humans.”
However, more research is needed to determine what dosage of the drug works the best.
Study details
Anopheles mosquito survival and pharmacokinetic modelling show the mosquitocidal activity of nitisinone
Lee Haines, Anna Trett, Clair Rose, et al.
Published in Science Translational Medicine on 26 March 2025
Summary
Nitisinone, an FDA-approved drug used to treat rare metabolic disorders, was investigated by Haines and colleagues for its ability to kill the malaria mosquito vector Anopheles gambiae. The authors show that nitisinone targeted a crucial enzyme that mosquitoes need to digest their blood meal. 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. These findings warrant further investigation of nitisinone for vector control and the prevention of malaria transmission.
AfricaNews article – Malaria confirmed as cause of deadly outbreak in DRC (Open access)
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