Few people need convincing that malaria is a deadly and terrible disease. The World Health Organization estimates that half of the world’s population is at risk, with 445,000 deaths recorded in 2016, most of which were in Sub-Saharan Africa. Young children and pregnant women are particularly at risk in areas with high transmission, and, although malaria has been on the global radar for decades, the World Health Organization recently noted a “troubling shift in the trajectory of the disease” with progress in reducing transmission and fatalities having stalled at the end of 2016.

Prevention and treatment methods have included insecticide treated mosquito nets, sprays, and anti-malarial drugs. Now, proponents of a new technology claim they can supposedly eliminate the disease at its source, in the very DNA of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes. It sounds fictitious, but that is the objective of Target Malaria, a research consortium that receives its core funding, $92 million, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and from the Open Philanthropy Project, funded largely by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

Target Malaria claims that there is a consensus “that new tools are needed to eliminate malaria.” Their “new tool” is a gene drive, a speculative technique intended to engineer the genetics of entire populations of the malaria-transmitting Anopheles gambiae species by a single release of an organism with engineered genes. Target Malaria aims to create strains of genetically modified female mosquitoes: essential genes for fertility are cut, preventing them from having female offspring or from having offspring altogether. These modified mosquitoes will be rigged to then pass on their genes to a high percentage of their offspring, supposedly spreading auto-extinction genes throughout the population.

Target Malaria’s project focuses on four countries: Burkina Faso, Mali, Uganda and Kenya. The project is most active in Burkina Faso: in 2016, genetically modified mosquitoes were exported to the country from Imperial College in London for contained experiments, with approval from the National Biosecurity Agency. The Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé (IRSS) in Burkina Faso, part of the Target Malaria consortium, plans to release the GM mosquitoes into the environment between July and November 2018 in one of three villages of Bana, Pala ou Sourkoudiguin. The consortium says it is planning a phased approach; in the first phase, it will release 10,000 “male-sterile” (non-gene drive) mosquitoes; in the second, another non-gene drive mosquito will be released into the open, to bias the mosquito population to be male only; in the third and final phase, the gene drive mosquitoes will be released, involving either male bias or female infertility.