After ‘humiliating’ raid, Burkina Faso halts ‘gene drive’ project to fight malaria
Oh great. Russian psyops are now disrupting the fight against malaria:
The move is “a real blow” to hopes for gene drives, says Fredros Okumu, a vector biologist at the University of Glasgow and the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania. “Target Malaria has made a huge investment in Burkina Faso” by training scientists and engaging with communities, he says. And although lab research can continue, finding sites for field tests has now become a lot harder, says Mark Benedict, a mosquito geneticist who until recently worked for Target Malaria. “Burkina Faso and Target Malaria were the most fully developed partnership, so it’s chilling.” The collapse of the project there may discourage other possible host countries. [...]
Opposition to the project has grown, fueled in part by false accusations spread through social media, such as that Target Malaria was weaponizing mosquitoes to spread disease or sterilize people. The claims are part of a wider pattern of disinformation campaigns in the region often linked to Russian networks, says Mark Duerksen, a security expert at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. “We’ve seen this kind of public health disinformation really take off in the last 12, 18 months,” he says.
The campaigns aim to sow “distrust of the West as having nefarious plots in Africa,” Duerksen says—and they play into the “sovereignist narrative” of Burkina Faso’s government, led by Ibrahim Traoré, a young military officer who took power in 2022 after two coups. Traoré has emphasized national autonomy and has revoked the licenses of many foreign nongovernmental organizations.
Tags: malaria russia propaganda disinformation mosquitos gene-drive