BLACKSBURG, Va., May 21 -- Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University issued the following news release:
When a stranger from Spain called Cassidy Rist in her first months at Virginia Tech, she almost didn't take the meeting.
The caller was Carlos Chaccour, a physician at the University of Navarra who worked on global health and tropical diseases. He told her he was working on ivermectin for malaria.
Rist, an associate professor of population health sciences at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, had spent years studying how animal and human diseases interact across communities. But she had never considered ivermectin as a tool for fighting mosquito-borne illnesses.
"Ivermectin doesn't treat malaria," she reca...