After ‘humiliating’ raid, Burkina Faso halts ‘gene drive’ project to fight malaria
After ‘humiliating’ raid, Burkina Faso halts ‘gene drive’ project to fight malaria
Tags: Africa, Funding, Genetically modified mosquitoes, Regulation, Sex distorter, Target malariaKai Kupferschmidt, Science, 2025.
On 11 August, the international nonprofit Target Malaria celebrated a milestone: In the village of Souroukoudingan, Burkina Faso, its researchers released about 16,000 male mosquitoes genetically modified to produce almost exclusively male offspring. The release, the first of its kind in Africa, was part of a project supported by the Gates Foundation that aims to rid the world of malaria using a so-called gene drive, a controversial technique to help desirable genes spread through a population fast.
But a week later, that dream suffered a major setback. On 18 August, judicial police showed up at the Research Institute in Health Sciences (IRSS) in Bobo-Dioulasso, a key partner in Target Malaria, to stage what scientists described as a “brutal, humiliating” raid. According to minutes of a 26 August meeting between researchers and the country’s science minister, IRSS scientists were “treated like criminals, with their offices and laboratories sealed and marked as crime scenes.” The minutes noted that “everyone was searched, including their vehicles, on the grounds that researchers might be carrying mosquitoes in their pockets.” Four days later, the government suspended all of Target Malaria’s activities in Burkina Faso indefinitely. IRSS scientists killed the mosquitoes still living in their insectary, and the government sent a team to spray insecticides in Souroukoudingan to kill the mosquitoes released there.
