GMO news related to India

13.04.2007 |

GM mosquitoes - boon or bane?

Indian public health experts are not at all excited by the news that American scientists have created genetically modified mosquitoes to help fight malaria, saying it had been tried here before and abandoned as a failure. ’We tried genetic control in the 1970s and abandoned it,’ P.L. Joshi, director of the National Vector Borne Diseases Control Program in New Delhi, told IANS. ’It seemed to work in the lab but failed at field level.’ [...] In any case, the work by US scientists is still far from being taken to the field. So far they have only managed to genetically engineer the mosquitoes to be resistant to a form of malaria that affects mice. This is different from the form that affects humans.

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