Hello and welcome to Health Check from the BBC.
I'm Claudia Hammond and every week the team and I scour the medical literature to see what's new that might affect our health.
So in a moment we'll have the medication that can make human blood poisonous to mosquitoes and stop them spreading malaria.
And later on the people in India and Tanzania learning to collect brainwave data from their own communities.
And to help me today I have science journalist and author Dr. Lyall Liverpool joining us from The Hague in the Netherlands.
How are you, Lyall?
I'm very well, thank you.
How are you?
I'm good, thanks.
And what else do you have for us today?
We'll be finding out why scientists have been wrapping people up to learn more about how we sweat.
Oh yeah, this is interesting, if a bit disgusting, but look forward to that later on.
Now we are starting with the big news in the malaria world, which is that the drug ivermectin,
which has long been used to treat other diseases,
has been shown in a large trial to reduce the number of people infected with malaria.
So, Lyal, there are existing medications which can prevent people from catching malaria.
So how is this new approach different?
So ivermectin isn't a new drug.
It's been used for decades to treat parasitic infections more generally.
So things like head lice, scabies and parasitic worms, for example.