Discovery of the Week
How to Net Malaria

A new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) suggests there may be a way to take the sting out of one of the world's deadliest diseases: malaria, which kills around a million people each year, most of them African children.

It's not a vaccine or a high-tech medical procedure. It's a technique that mixes insecticide with good old-fashioned mosquito nets--and adds a dash of ancient Chinese medicine.

Powerful 1-2 Punch

The technique is simple. Basically, you try to make sure everyone who might be infected with malaria has two things:

1. insecticide-treated mosquito nets to sleep under
2. easy access to a cocktail of anti-malaria drugs that includes artemisinin--an ancient Chinese medicine that's recently proven a boon in beating tough strains of the disease

How powerful could such a simple 1-2 punch be? According to the WHO report, the technique has already slashed national malaria mortality rates by more than half in Rwanda and Ethiopia--and they just started testing it in 2006.

That has the world's leading malaria fighters buzzing. "If this is done everywhere," says WHO's malaria chief, "we can reduce the disease burden 80 to 85 percent in most African countries within 5 years." If he's right, that could literally save millions of lives.

How It Works

Malaria is caused by a parasite that infects a certain type of blood-sucking mosquito. When one of those mosquitoes bites an infected person, it slurps up tiny malaria parasites. It then injects those parasites, along with its saliva, into the next person it bites. Before long, that person is suffering fever, chills, and flu-like symptoms--if not worse--and lies ready to pass the infection along to another hungry mosquito.

Malaria parasites can also spread through blood transfusions, organ transplants, and other direct blood exchanges. But those cases are rare. Most malaria is mosquito borne--and that means you can fight the disease either by attacking the parasites that cause it or by squashing the skeeters that spread those parasites.

The new technique tries to do both. The insecticide-laced mosquito nets help prevent the nasty buggers from slurping up or spitting out new malaria parasites. Meanwhile, the drug cocktails attack the parasites within infected people.

Unfortunately, the new technique does not cure malaria. Still, according to the former director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, "This is not theoretical. We do not have to wait for a vaccine or new drugs. If we implement today's technologies aggressively on a national scale, we will have a big impact."

--Steve Sampson

Want to know how you can help fight malaria? Click here.

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