An anti-worm drug, which makes human blood lethal to mosquitoes, could reduce malaria cases in young children by 20 per cent, scientists have found.

The drug, ivermectin, has been used for decades to treat parasitic diseases including river blindness and scabies, but could also be used to prevent malaria infections spreading.

Although deaths from the disease have dropped by roughly 48 per cent since 2000, malaria still killed 435,000 people in 2017. And according to the World Health Organisation, the number of reported cases rose by 3 million to a total of 219 million globally, in part due to growing insecticide resistance among mosquitoes.

But ivermectin could be a crucial new tool in the battle to eradicate the disease. The drug effectively makes a person’s blood lethal to the mosquitoes who bite them, reducing malaria infections by killing the insects themselves.

When given to entire communities in Burkina Faso three times a week, the drug reduced malaria infections from 2.5 cases per child to two and caused no obvious side effects, according to research published in The Lancet journal on Wednesday.