““In the 1990s, Taylor and his colleagues took these ideas into the field. They wanted to see if they could use an antibiotic called doxycycline to eliminate Wolbachia from people with filariasis. One group tested the drug in Ghanaian villagers with river blindness, while another tried it on Tanzanians with lymphatic filariasis. Both trials were successful. In Ghana, doxycycline sterilised the female worms, and in Tanzania, it wiped out the larvae. And at both sites, it killed the adult nematodes in around three-quarters of the volunteers, without triggering any catastrophic immune responses. That was huge. "For the first time, we were able to cure people of filariasis," says Taylor. "We can't do that with standard drugs.””
![“[we have]taming of an ancient disease [malaria] that over the centuries has killed untold millions of people.” quote by Margaret Chan](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/c2b/margaret-chan-13176_ancient_we-have-taming-of-an-ancient-disease-mal_2277069.jpg)
