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The villagers of Bana in Burkina Faso survive by working the land. Yet recently they have been paid to sit still for six hours while a fellow villager hovers close by on the look out for mosquitoes. When one lands on their neighbour they catch it, alive and intact, before it bites and then hand it over to researchers.
This is one small stage in a painstakingly slow process of research into the local mosquito population, led by scientists at Imperial College, London.
They hope that one day Burkina Faso will be the testbed for a technology that many hope will lead to the eradication of malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that is the biggest killer of children under five in Africa.
The researchers have developed a genetically-modified mosquito in their laboratory that can kill off its own species by spreading a faulty gene.
If it works in the wild, the technology – called gene drive – could help eliminate malaria where decades of efforts involving bed nets, repellents and insecticides have failed.
But as the scientists edge closer to releasing gene drive mosquitoes into the wild for the first time – by 2024 in Burkina Faso – environmental and human rights groups and others are desperate to slow the process down.
Playing God in this way, they warn, could do infinitely more harm than good.
“Gene drives are a complete unknown,” says Tom Wakeford, UK spokesperson for ETC, a global campaign group monitoring the impact of emerging technologies on biodiversity, agriculture and human rights.
“It’s a huge risk when we know that other approaches [to eradicating malaria] exist,” he adds.
Target Malaria, the name of the Imperial College-led research consortium, is just one of many projects exploring ways to engineer mosquitoes so that they stop spreading disease.
But unlike so-called ‘self-limiting’ genetic modification of mosquitoes – which, for example, renders them infertile or produce infertile offspring – gene drive works by unleashing a mutated gene that spreads rapidly through the species.
Once it is released it can’t be stopped.
“If it works, it will eliminate a whole species,” says Dr Wakeford, a biologist at the University of Exeter.
Target Malaria’s work in Burkina Faso, Mali and Uganda, involves just one of more than 3,000 species of mosquito, the Anopheles gambiae.
But environmentalists warn that removing even one species could disrupt the whole ecosystem in unforeseeable ways. Anopheles gambiae could be an important food source and pollinator without which the flora and fauna where it lives could change dramatically.
“There are agrarian communities [where gene drive research is taking place]. If their crops are affected, that’s their livelihoods, their health, everything," says Dr Wakeford.
Dr Ify Aniebo, a molecular geneticist from Nigeria, asks what the impact could be on the disease itself. In an article published by campaign group GMwatch he wrote: “Will the engineered organism upset the delicate balance of ecosystems, thereby causing new diseases to emerge or prompting already existing illnesses to spread?”
Although the chances are slim, it is also possible that a gene drive mosquito, once in the wild, could travel long distances or cross with another organism to produce something entirely new.
“The chance that this could spread across Africa seems reason to be cautious,” says Dr Wakeford.
But ETC’s greatest fear is over the colonialist overtones of experimenting with such high stakes interventions in Africa. The group fears the African leaders and communities where research is underway may be being hoodwinked into consenting and that many people have not been consulted properly.
ETC and others warn that African countries do not have the regulatory framework to manage the introduction of any type of GM insect.
At the United Nations convention on Biological Diversity in November, campaigners called for a moratorium on all gene drive field research. As Mariann Bassey-Orovwuje, chair of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, put it.
“In Africa we are all potentially affected and we do not want to be lab rats for this exterminator technology.”
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