The fight against disease-carrying mosquitoes has gone high-tech, with researchers recently using drones to deploy sterile male mosquitoes into regions of Brazil where diseases such as Zika and West Nile virus are rampant, according to an August 20, 2018 article in Smithsonian magazine.
Previous research has shown that the sterile mosquitoes crowd out fertile male mosquitoes, slow reproduction, and eventually drive down the population. Deploying the sterile mosquitoes, however, has been tricky, but the proliferation of drones has given researchers a point of entry, according to the article, which was written by Katherine Wu, a PhD student at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“This is a really exciting step forward,” said Kelsey Adams, a PhD student in the Chan School’s Flaminia Catteruccia Lab, who was not involved with the research. “With innovative techniques such as these, we can expand the areas into which we’re releasing [modified mosquitoes].”
Read Smithsonian article: Do Not Fear the Drones Air-Dropping 50,000 Mosquitoes From Above