Ivermectin Treatment of Livestock for Malaria Control on Sumba Island

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Progress against malaria has stalled. New ways to control malaria are urgently needed to aid malaria elimination efforts both globally and in Indonesia. Ivermectin is a drug that can be safely given to humans or animals that makes their blood lethal to Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit malaria. It has been shown in Indonesia that ownership of livestock increases the risk of malaria transmission, and people on Sumba Island keep their livestock underneath their house, potentially attracting more Anopheles and increasing their risk of contracting malaria. We propose to treat livestock with ivermectin and evaluate how effective this is against wild Anopheles on Sumba. This control measure could interrupt the transmission of malaria if deployed on wide scale, and provide benefits of treating worm diseases in the farm animals. Additionally, we will engage the community to demonstrate the potential benefits of treating animals with ivermectin to thwart malaria. We will hold small meetings to gain the community, public health workers, and government officials' perspective on this potential control measure. Understanding the community perspective would allow us to develop the most effective ways to expand and achieve compliance with this control measure on Sumba and other areas of Indonesia. There are many Anopheles species on Sumba and we know very little about their feeding preferences for humans or livestock. We will use both human and livestock baited traps to characterize the feeding behavior of Anopheles on Sumba to gain a better understanding about how effective ivermectin treatment of livestock could be if implemented on Sumba. If positive results shown here, then this intervention could be reproduced throughout Indonesia and other areas of the world to eliminate malaria.