r/technology • u/lurker_bee • 23h ago

Biotechnology Burkina Faso says no to Bill Gates’ plan of creating modified species of mosquitoes

https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/lifestyle/burkina-faso-says-no-to-bill-gates-plan-of-creating-modified-species-of-mosquitoes/xyk7xm8
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u/supreme_harmony 16h ago

This genetic modification technology is very cool, but it is certainly not the only way of eliminating malaria in a country.

Could you list these alternatives and how they are superior to the solution proposed by Gates?

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u/BeardedDragon1917 15h ago

People have been draining the habitats that mosquitoes breed in, spraying pesticides and introducing predators for quite a long time. This genetically modified mosquito technology is meant to work in tandem with those methods. It’s not a magic bullet that’s going to solve the problem all by itself, and Burkina Faso’s reluctance to sign onto the program isn’t stupidity or ego, it’s a very well earned distrust of the west when it comes down to foreign aid programs.

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u/supreme_harmony 13h ago

Thank you for the reply.

Unfortunately draining the habitats mosquitoes breed in is not a viable strategy in Burkina Faso. That would mean draining all swamps, regulating all rivers, and collecting all rainwater and removing all lakes in a country where they have no resources to build paved roads to most settlements. It is not even close to happening and it would be disastrous if it would.

Spraying pesticides is equally not going to happen and even if it did it would lead to much worse effects than malaria, hence why its not being done.

Which means the alternatives you are proposing perform worse, are harder to carry out, and they are not even going to happen.

I don't see from your reasoning how shutting down this programme is a good decision. It will simply lead to many innocent people dying. And you are even arguing for it. Sad.

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u/BeardedDragon1917 12h ago

It would be great if the research foundations involved would actually publish the full DNA sequences and breeding protocols they’re using to make these genetically modified mosquitoes. Then places like Burkina Faso can breed and release the insects locally, without depending on a pipeline controlled by a foreign lab. As it stands, the leaders of Burkina Faso know better than to build public health infrastructure that can be shut off at the whim of a Western government or NGO. That caution isn’t paranoia or ego; decades of “development aid” that came bundled with strings attached, resource extraction, and political interference has made many in Africa extremely skeptical of foreign aid. When you’ve been on the receiving end of structural adjustment, forced dependency, and aid-as-leverage for half a century, you don’t jump at the chance to let Bill Gates and the UK biotech industry control your mosquito supply.

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u/supreme_harmony 11h ago

Here is the DNA sequence: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070056051A1/en
Here is the paper describing how to create the mosquito strain: https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-7007-5-11
And here is a paper describing how you can order your own colony and breed them: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2018/7814643

Took me about 10 minutes to gather this.