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Kenya: Nation Poised to Adopt GMO to Boost Yields

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ronin	Posted: Apr 15 2011, 07:32 PM
Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 482 Member No.: 1 Joined: 23-December 10	Ronin: you fcking dumfcks. Do you know what yall just did? Yall have unleashed effectively starvation on the kenyan people. You jesuit whores! John Muchangi 13 April 2011 http://allafrica.com/stories/201104140188.html John Muchangi 13 April 2011 Kenya is on the verge of adopting genetically modified crops after the government promised to gazette both the Biosafety Act and its regulations. Players in the industry have been complaining there are no rules to guide field tests of bio-tech crops. Acting minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology Hellen Sambili promised to gazette the Act today and the regulations next week "I make a commitment to publish the act immediately and the regulations as soon as they are handed over to me," Sambili said at a one-day workshop convened to discuss the regulations.President Kibaki signed into law the Biosafety Act in 2009, but the relevant minister was expected to gazette the day of commencement. The delay was blamed on disagreements regarding the controversial law and politics over appointment of key officers into offices created by the act.The act establishes a powerful National Biosafety Authority to regulate all GMO activities in Kenya.Key officials were appointed to the authority last year and have been developing regulations to operationalise the Act. According to the proposed regulations, the NBA will license for up-to ten years players in GMOs provided their products have no negative effects on the environment. Sambili said the controversial technology can address food shortage in Kenya including the current scarcity of seeds and high food prices."The rapidly increasing global adoption of modern bio-tech crops is testimony to this," she said at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute. Chairman of Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture John Mututho warned scientists to be ethical and avoid "scientific mischief"."People will for instance not eat a pig in any form, so its genes should not be introduced into other food crops," he said. Chairman of the NBA Miriam Kinyua promised the draft regulations will be handed over to the minister immediately."The document will be submitted next week and the minister has promised to gazette them immediately," she said. Acting head of NBA Roy Mugiira said Kenya will join African countries who have already commercialized GM crops."We do not want to be left out of the bio-tech trade. In Africa, South Africa, Egypt and Burkina Faso are already growing the crops on large scale," he said. Kari has already been carrying out trials on cotton and maize. In 2009, importers brought in thousands of tonnes of GM maize from South Africa, and did not declare it as required by the law.

ronin	Posted: May 5 2011, 02:38 AM
Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 482 Member No.: 1 Joined: 23-December 10	Africa: How Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Can Help Wipe Out Malaria in Continent http://allafrica.com/stories/201105030546.html Nairobi � A scientific breakthrough that has enabled genetically modified mosquitoes to breed with those in the wild could transform Africa into a malaria free landscape over the coming decades. The finding by a group of British and American scientists was reported in the journal Nature. If successful, it means that scientists are one step closer to being able to change the DNA of wild mosquitoes in order to combat malaria. The tests, which were carried out in laboratory conditions, enabled a gene from a handful of mosquitoes to spread to most of the population in just a few generations. The hope is that if the right gene can be made to spread then researchers can reduce the number of cases of malaria. Research groups have already created "malaria-resistant mosquitoes" using techniques such as introducing genes to disrupt the parasite's development. But the key aim of the new research, according to Nature, was to "translate these achievements into control measures. (This) requires an effective technology to spread a genetic modification from laboratory mosquitoes to field populations." The great challenge remaining is to get genes to spread from the genetically-modified mosquitoes to the vast number of wild insects across the globe. Unless the gene gives the mosquito an advantage, it is likely to disappear. Scientists at Imperial College London and the University of Washington, in Seattle, believe they have found a solution. They inserted a gene which is very good at looking after its own interests into the mosquito DNA -- a homing endonuclease called I-SceI. The gene makes an enzyme that cuts the DNA in two. The cell's repair machinery then uses the gene as a template when repairing the cut. As a result, the homing endonuclease gene is copied. It does this in such a way that all the sperm produced by a male mosquito carry the gene, with the result that all its offspring have the gene. The process is then repeated so the offspring's offspring have the gene and so on. In the laboratory experiments, the gene was spread to half the caged mosquitoes in 12 generations. Academics have described the study as a "major step forward." Prof Andrea Crisanti, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, said: "This is an exciting technological development, one which I hope will pave the way for solutions to many global health problems. At the beginning I was really quite sceptical and thought it probably would not work, but the results are so encouraging that I'm starting to change my mind." He said the idea had been proved in principle and was now working on getting other genes to spread in the same way. He believes it could be possible to introduce genes which will make the mosquito target animals rather than humans, stop the parasite from multiplying in the insect or produce all male offspring that do not transmit malaria. Prof Janet Hemingway, from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said the work was an "exciting breakthrough". She cautioned that the technique was still some way from being used against wild mosquitoes and there were social issues around the acceptability of using GM technology. "This is however a major step forward, providing technology that may be used in a cost effective format to drive beneficial genes through mosquito populations from relatively small releases," she added. Dr Yeya Tour�, from the World Health Organisation, told the BBC: "This research finding is very important for driving a foreign gene in a mosquito population. However, given that it has been demonstrated in a laboratory cage model, there is a need to conduct further studies before it can be used as a genetic control strategy." The WHO estimated that malaria caused nearly one million deaths in 2008.