Single Oral Dose of Ivermectin as a New Therapeutic Trial for Contacts of Patients with Scabies

Background: Scabies is one of the common epidemic and endemic diseases worldwide. Many topical therapeutic modalities for scabies are available. Topical ivermectin has been used effectively in treatment of scabies but there is no oral effective therapy that prevents contacts to get scabies. Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of oral ivermectin in prevention of scabies contacts to get scabies. Patients and Methods: The study is a single-blinded therapeutic study that was conducted in the Center of Dermatology, Baghdad Teaching Hospital, Baghdad, Iraq during the period from April 2018 through October 2019.Two hundred sixty healthy scabies contacts were included in this study, their ages ranged from 5-60 years with a mean ± SD of 19.3± 1.9 years. All these contacts were screened for active scabies and they were all free. The contacts of scabies were treated by ivermectin tablet 200 microgram per kg as a single dose after 2 hours from dinner. They were seen regularly after 4 weeks to be re-examined and to record any scabies and drug side effects. Results: The response after four weeks of single dose therapy of healthy contacts showed that 245 (94%) from 260 were free of scabies and only 15(6%) contacts showed infection with scabies and this was statistically significant Chi-square (c2= 148, P-value less than 0.00000001. No any side effects were noticed in any treated contacts. Conclusion: Oral single ivermectin dose is an effective therapy to prevent scabies contacts to get infection. It an easy method of prevention which is very useful in condition of scabies outbreaks and epidemics to stop the rapid spread of the disease.