Promising malaria drug has a striking drawback: It turns urine vivid blue

Methylene blue, a dye, can kill the malaria parasites in the gametocyte stage, the point at which mosquitoes pick it up from human blood and pass it on to new victims

Tests in West Africa have found that a safe drug long used to treat urinary tract infections is also effective against malaria. But the medication has one disadvantage: it turns urine a vivid blue.
 
“This is something we need to solve, because it could stop people from using it,” said Teun Bousema, a microbiologist at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands and an author of the study, which was published on Tuesday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
 
Modern malaria treatments, based on the drug artemisinin, are still effective in Africa and save hundreds of thousands of lives