MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In sub-Saharan Africa, a child under 5 dies nearly every minute from malaria. Babies are especially vulnerable. New research suggests that there might be a pretty simple way to protect them during the day from mosquitoes that carry malaria. NPR's Jonathan Lambert has more.
JONATHAN LAMBERT, BYLINE: At night, babies can be kept safe from mosquitoes by sleeping under an insecticide-treated bed net. Bed nets have worked so well that some mosquitoes have started biting during the daytime to get their blood meals. This poses an obvious problem.
ROSS BOYCE: Most of us don't spend 24 hours a day in bed.
LAMBERT: That's Ross Boyce, an infectious disease researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. When babies in many parts of rural Africa aren't in bed, there's a good chance they'll be bopping around on Mom's back in a baby wrap, where they're exposed to bites. Boyce was thinking about how to protect babies out and about when he had an idea from his past.
BOYCE: I was in the military. All military uniforms are treated with permethrin.
LAMBERT: Permethrin is an insect repellent often infused into clothes to keep skeeters at bay. Boyce wanted to try the same thing with baby wraps.
BOYCE: It seemed sort of an obvious thing to do.
LAMBERT: To test it out, he and his colleagues did a massive experiment. In western Uganda, they gave 200 mothers with little babies a permethrin-soaked wrap. Two hundred others got a baby wrap that was just soaked in water. To be extra cautious, they reapplied the permethrin every four weeks.
BOYCE: That was probably overkill. But we really wanted to know, if we have enough permethrin in there, does it work?
LAMBERT: The answer was yes. Over six months, kids who got the treated wraps saw roughly 65% fewer cases of malaria than those with the water-soaked ones.
BOYCE: A level of effect that was kind of beyond even our wildest expectations.
LAMBERT: Thomas Eisele, a malaria researcher at Tulane University who wasn't involved in the study, agrees.
THOMAS EISELE: It's a really large reduction, surprisingly so.
LAMBERT: Of course, every intervention comes with potential drawbacks. Permethrin can be harmful if ingested, but the researchers didn't see a major uptick in side effects. Kids were just slightly more likely to get a rash. The research appears in the New England Journal of Medicine.
BOYCE: Nothing is a zero risk. But when you think about reducing the risk of a potentially fatal disease, it's certainly a trade-off that has to be considered.
LAMBERT: In the real world, it'd probably be impractical to resoak baby wraps so frequently, but manufacturers can make fabrics where the effect of the permethrin would last longer. Boyce imagines mothers getting such wraps may be once a year from local clinics, giving babies extra protection from this dangerous disease.
Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
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