Google plans to terminate world’s biggest killer which claims more than one MILLION lives a year

Verily, the Healthcare and life sciences wing of Google's parent company, Alphabet, has created a hi-tech robot that raises about one million mosquitoes every week in an automated lab in California. It has planned to release 20 million sterile male mosquitoes.

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Even though it appears to be bizarre, Scientists lauds this initiative, infected sterile pests being used to fight diseases such as Zika, dengue, and chikungunya - a mosquito-borne viral disease transmitted to humans.

As a part of Debug Project (Biggest US study to set free mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia, a common reproductive parasite), the overall idea is that the infected mosquitoes will try to mate with wild females, but the eggs laid will not hatch, leading to an overall decline in the mosquito population over time. It is also well known that Male mosquitoes won’t bite humans.

Verily has planned now to release 1 million mosquitoes/week over a 20-week period.

Verily senior engineer Linus Upson commented to MIT Technology Review, "If we really want to be able to help people globally, we need to be able to produce a lot of mosquitoes, distribute them to where they need to be, and measure the populations at very, very low costs."

A similar, but smaller scale, program was tried by CMAD and MosquitoMate in 2016. The new experiment alongside Verily involves 25 times more mosquitoes than this previous study.

Aedes aegypti - or yellow fever mosquitoes - were first spotted in central California in 2013. These are considered to be very invasive, originating in Africa, today they are spread across the entire tropical and subtropical regions. This Aedes Aegypti is notorious for being an operational vector carrying diseases like dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, with these blood-borne viruses reproduced in the mosquito’s stomach, they spread as they bite us.

These mosquitoes are likely to bite several times before they are full, increasing the chances of the disease spreading. Females of this species lay a cluster of up to 200 eggs near water, up to five times during its lifetime, making it easy for the population to increase rapidly.