The shutdown of the Bill Gates funded Target Malaria’s genetically modified mosquito experiments in Burkina Faso on 18 August continues to cause a major buzz in the malaria business. But the language used by a ‘Science’ article highlighted in MalariaWorld this week seems to take the angst of the neo-colonial promoters of harmful experimental technologies in Africa to a new level (I previously discussed this topic on 16 August and 29 August.)
The article by Kai Kupperschmidt of 03 September that also appeared in the print edition of Science (Vol 389, Issue 6764) is entitled ‘After ‘humiliating’ raid, Burkina Faso halts ‘gene drive’ project to fight malaria’ with sub-heading ‘Disinformation campaign may have triggered “brutal” shutdown of mosquito lab’. In a week in which Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered in Utah and Israel carried out a brutal attack on negotiators in Qatar, this use of the word brutal to describe these events seems somewhat excessive.
According to the article Target Malaria’s partner scientists were “treated like criminals, with their offices and laboratories sealed and marked as crime scenes.” “Everyone was searched, including their vehicles, on the grounds that researchers might be carrying mosquitos in their pockets.” Four days later, the government suspended all of Target Malaria’s activities in Burkina Faso indefinitely. The scientists killed the mosquitos still living in their insectary, and the government sent a team to spray insecticides in Souroukoudingan to kill the mosquitos released there.
Unpleasant, no doubt, but hardly brutal.
And last week MalariaWorld featured a blog article by Mark Benedict entitled ‘Burkina Faso’s Government Smashes its Trustworthiness Over Transgenic Mosquitoes’. According to Benedict ‘Is it a big loss for Burkina Faso? The largest. The reversal sends a signal to donors and collaborators that government assurances and approvals cannot be relied on to permit projects to reach completion.’ The entire tone of the article is that it is Burkina Faso’s loss that the neo-colonial promoters of harmful experimental technologies in Africa will not be plying their trade there.
Unfortunately for now, many other African countries are led by leaders with less integrity than Ibrahim Traore who will happily take a few dollars to allow their countries to be used for such experiments no matter what the potential effect on their people or environment. For instance, an article in MalariaWorld describes Target Malaria’s meeting in Uganda.
Malaria can be solved in Africa as it was in Europe, North America and most of Asia with improvements to nutrition and sanitation. This can be achieved by improving the overall economies of the nations. But instead, westerners provide harmful experiments and chemical treatments of people and the environment based on the dubious, if widely believed, hypothesis that malaria is a parasitic illness spread by mosquitos.