It turns out the news on malaria was too good to be true.

Scientists in Uganda and the United States told The Monitor that the New Vision story headlined "Malaria soon to be wiped out," of February 5, was based on misquotes and inaccurate information.

While that article claimed that tests of genetically engineered mosquitoes would begin on a Lake Victoria island soon, and supposedly quoted Dr. Louis Mukwaya of the Uganda Virus Research Institute saying as much, in fact the very earliest such tests could begin is in 2005, according to Dr. Frank Collins of Notre Dame University, Indiana, U.S.

Dr. Collins has studied Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes - the species largely responsible for the spread of the malaria parasite in Africa - to look for genes that could be modified to inhibit the transmission of malaria to humans.

The scenario described in the New Vision article was not an impossible one, but it is at best years away from fruition. While transgenic mosquitoes of other species that do not transmit malaria have been created in laboratories, such breeds of gambiae mosquitoes have not yet been created.

Dr. Marcello Jacobs-Lorena of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, U.S., has created transgenic Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes in a lab and demonstrated that their transmission of the malaria parasite is partly inhibited. He, too, said the trials of such mosquitoes in the field are a long way off.

"We accomplished only one step in a long road towards implementation of this technique," said Dr. Jacobs-Lorena. "The ultimate goal would be to spread the resistance gene that we have introduced into mosquitoes into the wild population in the field. That is quite a difficult goal."

Meanwhile, parallel efforts to test possible sites for field studies of the transgenic mosquitoes are merely in the startup phase, and testing those sites will take at least three years.

At a September workshop in London, attended by Drs. Mukwaya, Collins, and Jacobs-Lorena, researchers discussed the scientific and ethical issues that must be resolved before transgenic mosquitoes can be released into the wild. According to Dr. Collins, researchers agreed that they must look for possible sites for field tests. In this context, Dr. Collins suggested to Dr. Mukwaya that he begin preliminary research into the genetics of malaria on certain islands on Lake Victoria, with an eye toward possibly using one island for a future field test.

Dr. Mukwaya confirmed in an email to The Monitor that he had been misquoted in the New Vision article. "I never said that the team was ready for the tests, but I said that my team is surveying islands in Lake Victoria at the moment for malaria vectors and the information obtained may be useful in the search for a suitable site for field trials in the future with genetically engineered or modified mosquitoes for possible eradication of malaria," Dr. Mukwaya wrote in the email.

"I told the members that even when a suitable site is found, we would still need to get permission from government e.g. the Ministry of Health, the National Research Council and NEMA (the National Environment Organization) before any release is done," Dr. Mukwaya added.

This clarification is especially important because of the politically sensitive nature of genetic engineering research. "I am particularly concerned about this [New Vision article] because it could give the impression that the scientific research community has embarked on a field test of a genetically manipulated mosquito without any of the preliminary approvals for safety, efficacy, social acceptance, whatever, that obviously should precede something like this," Dr. Collins said.

Activists who oppose genetic modification work have sometimes portrayed genetic researchers as mad scientists who fail to carefully consider the ramifications of their work, but instead unleash it unthinkingly on an unsuspecting public. And while researchers in transgenic mosquitoes have, according to Drs. Collins and Jacobs-Lorena, made pains to avoid such foolhardy actions while attempting to wipe out a disease that kills millions each year, the New Vision article threatens to revive that bad image.

"There they go again," said Dr. Collins, describing the false image that could result, "the unrestrained scientists with their genetically engineered creatures, releasing them on the world without any prior assessments of benefits and risks, and without any prior attempt to communicate with authorities and the public."

While malaria will not be eradicated by research into transgenic mosquitoes any time soon, the technique has shown much promise.