Killing mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles, the sort that transmit malaria, is a serious business—so serious that some doctors would like to do it by using people as bait. Their idea is to dose those in malarious areas with a drug called ivermectin. This will not protect the dosees directly, for it does not act on the parasite that causes the disease. But it may protect them indirectly, by making their blood poisonous to Anopheles. Mosquitoes do not tend to fly far from the place they hatch, and experiments suggest that if most of a village’s inhabitants were to take ivermectin they could collectively do serious damage to the local Anopheles population. That would substantially reduce the number of cases of malaria in an area.
Whether this is ethical is debated. Ivermectin is used routinely to treat filariasis, river blindness, scabies and several other diseases. But drugging healthy people is generally frowned on. At the moment, though, there is a more practical objection. Ivermectin does not hang around in the body long enough to make a concerted anti-mosquito campaign that relies on it look like a realistic proposition. And it is this that Robert Langer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Giovanni Traverso at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, hope to change.
The President of the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD), Vuk Jeremić delivered a lecture at ADA University, Azerbaijan’s top-tier educational institution entitled "Geopolitics of the Balkans and How it Relates to the Caucasus”.
Read more
Vuk Jeremić lectures at the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna
At the invitation of the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, one of the most prestigious and oldest schools on the European continent, CIRSD President Vuk Jeremić delivered a lecture entitled “(Geo)politics of the Balkans: The Revenge of History”, on February 7th, 2023.
Read more
Prof. Sachs: “Sanctions against Russia ineffective and contrary to international law”
CIRSD had the privilege to host one of the world’s brightest minds and most famous economists – Prof. Dr Jeffrey Sachs in a live discussion titled "The winter of Our Discontent".
Read more
Central Asia: The Age of Reform
The Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD) co-organized a conference on December 7, 2022, titled “Central Asia: The Age of Reform” at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, one of the most prestigious and oldest (1754) schools in Europe.
Read more