(NewsNation) — The deadliest animal in the world is the pesky blood sucking mosquito, killing an estimated 700,000 people a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But a new study published Wednesday suggests that a rare medication has the potential to make human blood deadly to mosquitoes, offering a new way to treat deadly diseases like malaria, West Nile virus, yellow fever and Dengue fever.
Dr. Omer Awan, a physician and a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, joined “Morning in America” to discuss nitisinone, an FDA-approved drug used to treat rare metabolic diseases.
Now, the drug could be used to treat malaria.
“The way it works is that it prevents a mosquito’s ability to digest its blood meal, and that will kill a mosquito very quickly, so it could potentially be a game changer when you consider just how common malaria is,” Awan said.
An estimated 263 million malaria cases were reported worldwide in 2023, according to the World Health Organization, and 597,000 people died from the disease caused by mosquitoes.
“This is really starving the mosquito. That’s literally what it’s doing, so they will die within hours,” Awan said.
The researchers in the study compared mosquitoes that were given human blood that had nitisinone versus blood that did not.
“Even at low therapeutic doses, nitisinone remained deadly to mosquitoes,” the study said. “These findings warrant further investigation of nitisinone for vector control and the prevention of malaria transmission.”