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Health|In Fight Against Malaria, an Unexpected — and Snuggly — Shield
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/health/insecticide-treated-baby-wraps-carriers-malaria.html
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Global Health
Treating baby wraps with a mosquito repellent shows promising protection against a top killer of children.
Stephanie Nolen has reported on efforts to combat malaria for more than 25 years.
Oct. 25, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
As an American medical resident in a global health program in Uganda 12 years ago, Dr. Ross Boyce saw the devastating toll of malaria firsthand. About half of the patients he saw in a rural clinic had the disease. Most were very young children; many recovered with treatment, but some did not survive.
Dr. Boyce noticed something else: All of the Ugandan mothers carried their babies tied on their backs with a wide piece of cotton. And this made him think about the clothing he wore long before medical school, when he was deployed to Iraq as an infantry officer: the U.S. military treated his uniforms with permethrin, a long-acting insecticide, to protect against mosquito-borne illnesses.
Dr. Boyce floated an idea among his Ugandan colleagues: Could they treat baby wraps in insecticides too? Might that keep mosquitoes away from babies?
One colleague thought it was worth a try. They needed new solutions, said Dr. Edgar Mulogo, a professor of public health at Mbarara University of Science and Technology, because progress against malaria had stalled.
The remarkable results of that brainstorming session were published recently in one of the world’s top medical journals.
Dr. Boyce, today an expert on the epidemiology of malaria, Dr. Mulogo and their colleagues carried out a large, randomized clinical trial in Kasese, Uganda, where Dr. Boyce helped treat so many malaria patients back in 2013. Two hundred women were given fabric treated with permethrin in which to carry their babies, and 200 women in a control group were given wraps without the repellent.
