Organic pesticide doubles up as worm killer
A common organic pesticide could do double duty as a cure for intestinal worms, and drag hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - provided cash can be found for human trials.
More than 1 billion people, almost all of them living below the World Bank's poverty line of $1.25 a day, are plagued by nematodes. While the worms don't usually kill, they stunt growth, cause anaemia and impair cognitive development.
All this helps to "trap the 'bottom billion' in poverty", says Peter Hotez, a specialist in tropical diseases at George Washington University in Washington DC. Existing treatments don't work well on all types of worms - and resistance is emerging.
Now Raffi Aroian at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues have shown that the protein Cry5B, produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis and used as a crop pesticide, could act as an effective drug. An oral dose cleared around 70 per cent of the worms from infected mice.
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