A scientist has found a new way of tackling malaria - by inventing a diet pill for mosquitoes. It works by starving larvae to death.

Dov Borovsky, Professor of Insect Biochemistry at the University of Florida, who made the discovery, says it could reduce the incidence of malaria by 30%-50%. The disease kills 3 million people each year.

The find was made when Dr Borovsky was looking for a way to stop the development of eggs in malarial mosquitoes. Instead, he identified a hormone that stops the creatures from digesting food.

Dr Borovsky explained: "We extracted proteins from mosquitoes' ovaries to see if there were any hormones among them, which might regulate egg development.

"We found that instead of having a pregnancy pill we had a diet pill. The peptide hormone we isolated, instead of having effects on reproduction, actually stopped the mosquito digesting blood."

The hormone filled a double purpose: "A mosquito that can't digest blood can't produce eggs because all the chemical building blocks for the yolk are derived from its blood meals. So we had made the mosquitoes sterile. But what had really happened was, we had starved them to death."

The discovery only affected adult mosquitoes, but Dr Borovsky found a way to apply it to larvae - which are much easier to track down than flying mosquitoes.

Dr Borovsky created water-living algae, Chlorella, which actually produce the hormone, and when added to mosquito-infested water, can kill millions of larvae in 72 hours. The more they eat, the more they cannot digest and eventually, they starve to death.

A mosquito diet pill could be on the market within 18 months - although the genetically engineered algae will have to be checked for possible environmental side effects and for damage to the larvae of other insects that might be beneficial.

The University of Florida has obtained several patents for the processes involved, and a Californian-based firm, Insect Biotechnology, is working on industrial production.
 

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